Source: RSM US LLP.
ARTICLE | June 07, 2021
Every organization has its own unique challenges when it comes to managing risk, controlling costs and integrating business processes for optimal efficiency. Often, these challenges are too big for internal resources to overcome and outsourcing solutions are needed.
The good news is that outsourcing solutions—just like business itself—have been transformed by technology. For instance, it’s now possible for middle market companies to hire virtual executives, outsource core back-office functions such as finance and accounting, and hire a 24/7 team to protect systems and data from growing cybercrime threats.
Working with a managed service provider can involve much more than just handing a list of tasks to a new group of people. It can provide the means to make your organization more effective and efficient. Following are five ways a managed service provider can help your organization improve business performance through outsourcing solutions.
1. Improving process efficiency wherever needed
Identifying and acting on both granular and big-picture opportunities to trim time and costs in business processes is often challenging for organizations. Managed service providers with experience designing efficient systems that optimize how people, processes and technology work together can identify and help organizations act on opportunities of all sizes to reduce both process time and costs.
By selecting a managed service provider that has industry- or function-specific expertise, outsourcing solutions can be targeted to your organization’s particular needs. For example, a provider could design a finance and accounting outsourcing solution that specifically addresses the finance needs of a nonprofit organization, or the provider may offer the back-office support you need for particular finance and accounting functions.
Inefficiency also often results from a lack of business process integration. When a managed service provider helps with integration, it can streamline governance and workflows, delivering both cost and time savings for your business.
2. Keeping systems and processes operating without disruption
One of the advantages of outsourcing solutions to a managed service provider is that it can give your organization access to sought-after skills you can’t find or can’t afford to hire in-house. For mission-critical capabilities, such as ensuring the reliability of core applications and protecting against the risk of cybercrime, a gap in skills can make your organization more vulnerable to business disruption—the ultimate time- and money-waster.
Outsourcing solutions can solve this problem. An effective plan for reducing risk and containing costs in these types of cases could include managed IT services, managed application services and virtual CISO services; audit assistance can also be effective. Because these are some of the most in-demand and in-short-supply roles, the advantages of outsourcing these services can be significant.
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3. Tapping into predictable, around-the-clock service
Outsourcing can provide proactive monitoring and digitally delivered services 24/7, which can be essential for critical concerns such as application availability and security. In other cases, such as transaction processing and account reconciliations, outsourcing and automation can enable these activities to be performed continuously if needed.
Few small or middle market companies can afford to set up and staff 24/7 positions on their own. But such roles are critical for businesses of all sizes. Outsourcing solutions can make them affordable.
For instance, small and midsized companies once believed that cybercrime affected only large enterprises. Now, more of these organizations are realizing that their firms are targets as well. However, in-sourcing 24/7 protection against cyberrisk is prohibitively expensive. Managed service providers can set up a comprehensive solution to protect all of your company’s systems, whether they’re on premise or in a private or public cloud.
4. Planning and executing for efficient growth
Whether your organization is experiencing organic growth, going through a merger or acquisition event or rapidly adding new employees, effective business process integration is essential to help you control costs and meet profitability goals. Business process integration also allows for faster stand-up of new systems and applications to streamline business processes as your company grows.
Managed service providers with deep and broad expertise can apply best practices gleaned from previous client engagements to help your organization scale quickly. For example, a provider with a wide portfolio of managed service offerings can offer outsourcing solutions that help with transaction management for a merger or acquisition, develop a business process integration plan, quickly stand up the newly integrated systems for that plan and then provide IT managed services and consulting over the life of your systems.
5. Enabling scalability and cost-effective agility
Organizations seeking to stay competitive and relevant in today’s business environment must respond to change quickly and cost effectively. Whether it’s driven by customer behavior, economic and social events, or new regulations, change is a constant, and it’s happening at a faster pace than ever before.
A managed service provider with industry-specific business experience and a large portfolio of services can support organizational agility by providing new or expanded services as needed.
For instance, when the recent pandemic spurred a host of new requirements for safety in the workplace, many companies turned to service providers to help them quickly create applications that would communicate and execute these new safety rules. With the help of an always-on provider, organizations can spin up such digital solutions rapidly and cost effectively, enhancing their competitiveness.
Regulatory change is another situation that requires an agile response. Failure to comply with recent changes to lease accounting standards, for instance, could expose an organization to both financial and compliance risk. Because the new standard can affect many aspects of a business—including accounting, reporting, taxation and technology—understanding all of its implications and responding appropriately is a complex task.
Many companies lack the in-house resources to create this new compliance program on their own. Fortunately, public and private companies and government agencies that have many leases and need assistance can use a wide range of outsourcing services—including lease accounting outsourcing, outsourced accounting services and internal audit outsourcing—to comply with the new rules.
Better business performance through outsourcing
From the rising threat of cybercrime to new and complex regulations, organizations today face nonstop change. In this environment, success demands continually improving your business performance—something many small and middle market organizations often lack the in-house skills and resources to do. Outsourcing solutions from an experienced managed service provider can help.
A strong managed service provider will look cohesively across multiple areas of a business—accounting, finance and tax, IT, etc.—to optimize process efficiency, fill skills gaps, streamline business processes and support an agile response to change. It can also leverage tools and technologies that might be too costly or too complex for an organization to implement on their own.
In today’s multifaceted business landscape, outsourcing solutions can help organizations of all sizes improve their business performance, becoming more effective, more efficient and ultimately more successful.
This article was written by RSM US LLP and originally appeared on Jun 07, 2021.
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