History of Beyond Outsourcing
In 1997, the founder of Beyond Outsourcing, Suzanne Ravenall, Group Chief Executive Officer, saw a gap in the market to assist companies by engaging in the provision of outsourced operations execution, through the provision of a generic and scalable toolkit, enforcing measurement and delivery of the complete operational process. The idea of the business goes back to 1988, based on two noticeable facts:
Organisations were employing graduates in abundance, who had exceptional skill around the areas of strategy and their respective technical fields, however the majority of these graduates did not have a clear understanding around operational execution. It is widely accepted that the skills of strategic thinking and execution generally are supplied by two different types of people.
Although well laid-out plans and strategies are fantastic, they are meaningless without execution. Organisations were obtaining highly qualified people but in turn were not recruiting equally the same amount of execution people “doers” to enable the execution of the plans to materialise. At the same time the world was speeding up – innovation, technology and competition introduced volatility and speed to the world and to the business environment; this in turn placed huge pressures on businesses to improve their performance and implement faster (and more efficiently) than ever before.
As a result of these two key factors, the problems of execution and staying ahead of the business curve are now firmly on every CEO’s agenda worldwide. It is a fact that shareholders value strategy implementation way above strategy itself.
The Beyond Outsourcing response to this world-wide problem was to design, build and implement a generic and scalable (standardised) product that could meet the market demand/problem of sustainable operations execution.
Suzanne believed that if Beyond Outsourcing could build a generic and scalable toolkit consisting of process, methodologies and systems (to enable the process), for the purposes of execution, that could be placed in anyone’s hands regardless of qualification, providing SUSTAINABLE business transformation, a powerful offering would have been developed. Service areas had to be selected where the challenges were exactly the same regardless of country and industry, to enable a generic scalable toolkit to be applied.
Hence the 5 areas chosen to be able to deploy a toolkit:
- Field Services (CRM)
- Labour Managed Services and Training (HRM)
- Back Office (BOM)
- Supply Chain Management (SCM) and
- Enterprise Asset Management (EAM)
Generic and scalable (standardised) – meaning re-usable and expandable regardless of country or industry – requiring no tailoring to suit the environment.
Toolkit – meaning a set of tools containing all elements required to be able to execute against a plan. Sustainable business transformation – transforming a company or department with toolkits and change that will continue to work and improve for the longer term.
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