In-house or outsource?

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Permalink Reply by Sachin Ghodke on September 15, 2008 at 5:29am

Hello Joshua, you have made a valid point but as is the norm the lines between in-house and offshore are thinning rapidly. As more companies provide these offshore services some are gearing to work on the intricacies of creative work. This is one type of work that will not get outsourced easily. It requires a immense amount of understanding about the local market and its businesses. Work needs to be overseen constantly and the interpretation of language over distance is lost in transition.

The bigger challenges as I see are
(1) Communication
(2) Understanding of business rules
(3) Interpretation of instructions
(4) Skills
(5) Process mapping

I feel that creative services should not be outsourced now. These lines are blurring too and as i see it - factory-type work which does not require too much of an individual's intelligence to be applied needs to be outsourced. This reduces unwanted burden on parent company and leaves with more time to work on important assignments. reducing costs and optimizing in-house resources.

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Permalink Reply by Joshua Thomas on September 15, 2008 at 10:23am

Thanks for the input, Sachin!

I definitely agree with all of your comments and to-date, that very same model has worked well for us. We try and work as efficiently as possible. Our goal has always been optimization of ... well ... just about everything =) ! And to date, offshoring portions of production has worked very well for us while keeping creative direction and more intense design-centric aspects of the creative cycle local and in-house.

But to expand the conversation a little bit ... technically, the company I work for would be an "outsource" company. Domestic publishers outsource their production/creative cycles to us and we in-turn split the publication into various sub-workflows and depending on efficiency, will then:

-a- Use in-house labor
-b- Outsource to a partnered company
-c- Pull in some of our approved contractors
-d- Offshore to an approved company

It was a difficult decision for us, when we decided to start outsourcing and offshoring ourselves. I mean really? We're an outsource company that is outsourcing!

But it really made a lot of sense since we are already an outsource company. It makes it a lot easier for us to manage other outsource companies and not just keep quality at status quo, but rather improve it since we can choose different workflow paths for different publications.

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Publishers and companies like mine are constantly making the decision to:

-a- Outsource or
-b- Stop outsourcing and pull everything internal

I think we've all seen an equal amount of both positive and negative results from either decision. I think it's a very organic decision with lots of variables to consider... especially if you're end goal is to NOT compromise quality, time or cost.

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Permalink Reply by David Cardillo on September 23, 2008 at 2:19pm

In my opinion, the only real questions are how quickly do I need it, how much do I want to spend, and what's the quality of work I expect?

In my experience, small groups, who are familiar with your expectations and annotations (e.g. they can read your handwriting), can give you consistent, timely results, regardless of location.

How many other clients do they service? How sure can you be that the person who picks up your stuff has worked on your stuff before and even has an idea of what you're looking for? I've had mixed results with both in-house staff and large, national prepress companies.

I like being able to pick up the phone, say, "more red," and see a proof later that day.

Does it need to be finessed? Can you hand it off to anyone with (seemingly) simple instructions, or do you have to have "your guy" do it? Every step someone is removed from you (by location or language) means that your processes have to be that much more rigid. Some publications fit this better than others. High School yearbook? Car parts catalog? Write a script that lays them out automatically (or pay someone in China to do it). Retouching a celebrity cover? You'd better have that person down the hall, next to the proofer.

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Permalink Reply by Joshua Thomas on September 23, 2008 at 2:34pm

Thank you very much for the input. I think you summed up the thought process on this topic very nicely... very well put!

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