Bierce & Kenerson, P.C.

Sourcing Advisor Portal: Trends for 2007-2008

As experienced legal advisors on the business of outsourcing and outsourcing transactions, we regularly comment on developing trends. Consistent with reports of major international transactions and our experience in the mid-sized and smaller deals, we anticipate that enterprise customers will pursue emerging trends, which we have been advising on:

multi-silo sourcing, covering different types of services through one master provider.
"multi-sourcing" transactions, in which customers are negotiating with multiple service providers to provide mini-competitions for individual statements of work.
conflicts of law and extraterritorial application of domestic law and domestic operational principles, all of which require careful design, due diligence, planning and execution of international outsourcing transactions.
an executive push to develop a contractual framework for an ongoing outsourcing relationship before all the details are being resolved, which involves selection of one or more service providers first and definition and allocation of tasks second.
evolving business process management strategies that that will increase the visibility of opportunities for alignment of insourced customer relations (and other core functions), outsourced operational support services and web-enabled self-service.
acceleration of establishing foreign captive service centers, using outsourcing service providers to incubate them and ensure quality control and service level compliance before handing over new service centers to the enterprise customer on a turnkey basis.
increased focus on controls by the enterprise customer to manage risks.
increased efforts by the enterprise customer to shift operational, legal, tax, privacy, compliance, audit and other risks to the service provider.
emerging legislative agenda to restrict, regulate and monitor all forms of outsourcing, particularly those that involve personally identifiable data of consumers, taxpayers, employees, patients and credit card holders.
emerging legislative agenda for fair trade, to limit the abuses of free trade by imposing new constraints, enforcing WTO agreements and reciprocity of equal opportunity in bilateral trade between nations.