Gaining a competitive advantage allows the companies to, among other things, move more quickly, increase profitability and gain market presence. Generally the easiest process to control to increase profitability is the reduction of costs, ahead of the more complex strategies to increase sales.
Outsourcing: Competitive advantage for companies
In most cases, the best cost reduction strategy is to outsource functions that add little value to the company's business process, allowing it to focus on its strategic objective, its core business, and leaving ancillary tasks to specialized suppliers.
Accounts payable is one of the areas that companies are most interested in outsourcing, for several reasons:
- Not part of the main process of the company.
- It is characterised as semi-manual and broken up: Little technology, not uniform and out of step with the other manual/intellectual activities.
- It requires excessive consumption of human resources in routine activities with little added value that do not encourage professional or personal growth for the individual.
- You wish to greatly improve your incident resolution response times. Prioritization and deviation margin control are pending virtues to be developed.
- Implies the participation of non-necessary actors who provoke redundancies and unnecessary erosion.
- There is a desire to bring more satisfaction to the internal and external clients of the financial department.
- The process suffers from significative quality metrics which impede the application of correct measures. The process is not flexible to provide for the seasonal peaks common in the sector.
If the company resources are dedicated and concentrated on the true value of business, and the ancillary services are covered by specialised and efficient service providers, the company gains competitivity and agility.
