According to an exercise performed at Harvard business school in 2008 it is estimated that between 20-40% of the jobs that make up the Irish economy are able to be exported overseas. We review this exercise at this critical juncture because two years after this exercise the reality points to the accuracy of the exercise in light of the present economy. As a business in a struggling economy there are pressures to export and outsource functions your business used to consider part of your core competency, and so how do you adapt your operations strategy to combat the outsourcing of your operation? The simple answer is through a review of your core competencies and an addition of opportunity exploitation to supplement your bottom line. 

The act of off-shoring a function is to derive either a strategic advantage or a cost advantage in a given activity. Given the struggling nature of Ireland’s currency Ireland is in a prime spot to utilize their ailing currency to become a low cost provider of services and goods. Every job in the organization needs to be evaluated in terms of its “outsourceability” and the leaned out to remove the waste in the process. Simple data entry jobs are typically those first outsourced as well as call center positions that pose no real physical requirement to be in the country. However an organization can look outside of their core competencies and offer the opportunities that their business creates to a wider market base and turn those tasks into profit centers. Through value stream mapping and sound lean concepts it is possible to derive a profit for the service at a price lower than some off shore companies.  In their book Rework the authors hit it right on the head that “You cannot make something without making something else”. Operations in a country must look at the off-shoots of their process to leverage it into a profit. 

The common response to this is “we are not in the call center business” or “we are not in the daycare business” .However in the new future with more mobile options for both your workforce and your clients these sorts of opportunities may be the new competitive advantage as the price for your core competencies dips as a result of increased competition from lower priced areas. Some of the areas that a business should be looking toward includes derivative information that is the spin-off of their data mining process, companies will gladly pay for the data you spin off anyway and do not use as part of your process. More tangible goods may be the plastic shavings from your turning process that can be used by an injection molder somewhere, or the tooling process that you created to meet your own needs. Leverage these non-core competencies and you will find the push to outsource will not result in either a cost nor a competitive advantage, and this will keep your domestic operations humming.