Outsourcing

International business is one of the interesting courses that each MBA student should pass. Our instructor in this course was Dr. Mo Yamin, a very nice guy from Manchester Business School, one of the best business schools all around the world. He assigned us a project to review outsourcing as one of the significant trends in strategies of MNEs (Multinational Enterprises) through a case.
My teammate and me as team A, had decided to go more generally for reasons and challenges of outsourcing, and also provide some mini cases in interesting parts. Here is a brief review of our report:
Through studying many mini cases and literatures, we had found that there are many reasons for MNEs to outsource some parts of their activities. The most important benefits were cost reduction that comes from lower cost of production factors in various places, flexibility that comes from ability to change level of production with no significant cost or investment in response to changing demand, better quality as a result of experience of outsourcee in special field, and focusing on core business due to transferring none-core activities to an external party and making resource free.
But firms should pay attention to the challenges of outsourcing. Psychic distance among different countries, time differences, conflicting objectives, matter of security, intellectual property, controlling quality, and so many other factors should be considered during these kinds of projects.
It's generally suggested that firms outsource non-core activities to keep their competitive advantages and know-how, but they should pay attention to their brand name as an umbrella on all their internal and external activities.
We had found many success and failure cases. If you want know more about these cases and complete results of our project don't hesitate to contact me through my mail.

Amin from Team A