Outsourcing Patterns Research Articles

Outsourcing Decision and Intra-firm Wage Bargaining

Firm's outsourcing decision changes the match surplus to be split as well as the rule for splitting the surplus with employees. This study proposes and estimates a simple wage bargaining model that tracks down the time variation of revenue, cost, and input variables while taking the outsourcing patterns as given. The model is examined using a firm-level panel data containing administrative information on income statement and balance sheet provided by the National Tax Service of South Korea. Evidence suggests that outsourcing firms tend to have (i) higher bargaining power against employees, (ii) a larger fixed cost of bargaining failure, and (iii) match surplus more responsive to the cost of purchases. These observed patterns are strong for large-sized firms with 300 or more employees.

Outsourcing in supply chain: A bibliometric analysis

The purpose of this paper is to conduct a bibliometric analysis to analyze trends and patterns of outsourcing and supply chain research results using statistical and co-word analysis. The search results in the Scopus database yielded 787 relevant documents with the keywords outsourcing and supply chain from 1997 to early 2022. The results of the bibliometric analysis resulted in the number of publications, citations, subject areas, country, keywords, and topic clusters. The trend of outsourcing and supply chain research tends to increase every year although it had a significant decline in 2011. The documents with the most citations are related to supplier selection using analytical network processes, optimization of outsourcing partners, and ICT in the supply chain. The four fields that dominate the research area are business management, engineering, decision science, and computer science. The United States of America is the most productive country with the most citations. There are four cluster topics formed: the importance of supply chain management in outsourcing in industry and ICT in company activities, the impact of supply chain on business performance and outsourcing decisions, logistics outsourcing decisions to third parties and their effectiveness, lastly the benefit costs of outsourcing and the implications for product management. This paper provides an additional updated overview of the outsourcing and supply chain research map.

Increasing disparities in the embedded carbon emissions of provincial urban households in China

In the context of carbon neutrality and the National Economic Circle Strategy, understanding regional disparities in carbon emissions from household consumption is conducive to regional coordination as well as high-quality and low-carbon development in China. In this study, a multiregional input-output (MRIO) model and structural decomposition analysis (SDA) are adopted to investigate the regional disparity change trends of embedded carbon emissions (ECEs) from urban households and the underlying drivers during the rapid economic development period from 2002 to 2012 in China. The results indicate that the eastern regions tended to have larger increments in total urban household ECEs, while the western regions tended to have faster growth rates. An increasing disparity and evident outsourcing pattern can be observed during the study period. The consumption level had a strong positive effect on urban household ECEs in all of the provinces, while the carbon efficiency, consumption pattern, production structure, and population size had differentiated offsetting effects on urban household ECEs in various provinces. The results obtained in this study are conducive to promoting joint efforts for carbon emission reduction and narrowing regional disparities.

KPO’s: India's Ascension to the Top of the World

In the global scenario, technological advances and the growth of the information industry provided new market opportunities. Since business processing at low levels, multinational companies have begun outsourcing value-added ways of outsourcing of business processes. This has created a new outsourcing pattern, Knowledge Process Outsourcing, KPO. This covers intellectual property, equity and finance research and research, analysis, business research and data processing etc. After performance in BPOs, India is now focusing on KPOs. It is estimated that this business would hire 250,000 people by 2010. This paper addresses questions concerning the outsourcing of knowledge processes in terms of the Hecksher Ohlin model. It examines new developments in India's KPO market. It provides an outlook on the benefits of India in KPO and its evolving economic prospects. It also underlines the problems facing the next KPO market. Implementation of policies on challenges is often debated.

Public, private or hybrid? Providing care services under austerity: the case of Italy

PurposeThe paper examines the different trajectories of externalisation and the development of different kinds of welfare mix in three different sub-sectors of socio-educational services: long-term care for the elderly, early childhood services and kindergartens. By integrating the industrial relations and comparative public administration literatures, it analyses the different rationales underpinning contracting-out decisions of Italian local governments.Design/methodology/approachThe paper adopts a multi-method, multi-level approach: quantitative data on the provision of socio-educational services and the nature of the providers are combined with the analysis of 12 case studies of municipalities through 80 semi-structured interviews and documentary analysis.FindingsThe paper argues that differentials in labour regulation across the public/private divide and the consequent possibility to access labour markets characterised by cheaper labour and higher organisational flexibility are a key explanation in local governments' decisions to outsource. Despite labour market factors playing a prominent role, their relevance is significantly tempered by political and social factors and particularly by the strong opposition of citizens, personnel and trade unions to pure market solutions in the provision of such services. However, the centrality of these factors depends on the nature of the services: political sensibility against privatisation proved to be stronger in kindergartens, while services for the elderly were more frequently and less contentiously privatised.Originality/valueThe main contribution is the integration of the two research traditions to analyse patterns of outsourcing in the socio-educational services in Italy, showing that neither of them is able, alone, to explain the different private/public mix characterising different social and educational services.

From BIM to extended reality in AEC industry

In the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry, Extended Reality (XR) technologies that simulate a construction project in a multidimensional digital model and present multiple aspects of a project can be a tremendous help in all stages of a project. This study aims to identify the outsourcing patterns for such technologies among construction project stakeholders. Currently, there is limited literature about XR technologies, and because of it, the sections containing the results of this study are as follows: (1) a concise review of the most recent VR, AR, and MR technologies in the design and construction industry; (2) an introduction to the most commonly used wearable XRs on the market in terms of features, ease of use, and their specifications; (3) a summary of the different methods and software used for converting the BIM model to VR, AR, and MR; and (4) finally, a case study included the integrated definition function (IDEF0) model that details how to convert the BIM model of the NASA-Mars habitat project to a VR and MR model that uses Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Samsung HMD, and Microsoft HoloLens headsets. Overall, this study provides a comprehensive review regarding using XR to solve a variety of construction project management issues effectively and efficiently. More importantly, this study provides a roadmap for future efforts involving the implementation of XR technologies in the AEC industry.

Oblivious DFA evaluation on joint input and its applications

Oblivious deterministic finite automata (DFA) evaluation is a powerful two-party primitive that has been widely used in cryptographic protocols. It enables two mutually distrusted participants to obliviously evaluate a DFA (provided by one party) on an input string (provided by the other party), while preserving the privacy of each party from the other one. However, this primitive is not flexible and powerful enough, in the sense that it only supports evaluation on input string that is provided by one participant. In this paper, we propose oblivious DFA evaluation on joint input (denoted as FODFAJI), a variant that extends the functionality of traditional oblivious DFA evaluation protocols. The new primitive enables two participants to collaboratively evaluate a DFA on a joint input, where the input is a combination of two input strings provided by both of the participants. To enable modularized instantiation, we first propose and instantiate FOTJC – oblivious transfer with joint choice – a functionality as modified oblivious transfer (OT), and then provide an efficient instantiation for FODFAJI in FOTJC-hybrid model. Security proof demonstrates that the proposed protocol is secure under semi-honest model, and theoretical performance analysis shows that it achieves satisfactory efficiency and scalability. FODFAJI is a basic as well as an important building block for high-level secure outsourced computing tasks. In this paper, we use secure outsourced pattern matching as a case study and show how it can be applied to construct such high-level protocols.

Physical education from the sidelines: pre-service teachers opportunities to teach in English primary schools

ABSTRACT After two decades of political interest in primary Physical Education (PE) and school sport, the London 2012 Games (and its promised legacy) ushered in a new wave of government investment. To date, the impact of this funding on new entrants to the profession is unknown. This paper draws upon findings from the first phase of a national study that gives insights into the opportunities of pre-service primary teachers (PSTs) to teach PE. A short online survey was administered to PSTs across England. Data were collected to identify how many lessons of PE were taught and who delivered the subject in schools. Nearly 50% of PSTs reported they had no opportunity to teach PE, largely due to curriculum outsourcing. We caution, that if a persistent pattern of outsourcing remains, this could continue the removal of PSTs from teaching PE and the exclusion of teachers from the subject altogether.

The outsourcing practice among small knowledge-intensive service firms

PurposeThis paper aims to present findings on outsourcing practices in small service firms in Iceland, where the prime focus is on knowledge-intensive service firms.Design/methodology/approachTo gain information on the scope and reason for outsourcing, telephone and online surveys were used. In total, 802 firms participated in the surveys, which were conducted in the period 2009-2018.FindingsThe results show that knowledge-intensive firms outsource far more than other service firms and are also more likely to have an outsourcing strategy. The grounds for increased outsourcing are cost reduction and strategic reasons, such as a focus on core competency and the search for external knowledge. In comparison with other firms, knowledge-intensive firms are increasingly outsourcing cleaning, security services, canteen and transportation, IT processes, human resource management, training and consulting. Additionally, managers of these firms select suppliers more on the basis of cost and quality. They also realize more cost savings as a consequence of outsourcing. Outsourcing had a very limited effect on employment in the firms, while cost reduction was achieved in 48.3 per cent of the firms involved.Research limitations/implicationsThe findings are in line with the resource-based theory and, interestingly, this is not limited to knowledge-based firms, but to a large portion of service firms as well.Originality/valueThis is the first in-depth study on outsourcing patterns in knowledge-intensive firms, which uses theoretical classification in empirical analysis.

Strategic outsourcing in SMEs

PurposeSo far, there are very few empirical research studies available on the outsourcing pattern among small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The purpose of this paper is to examine strategic outsourcing among Icelandic SME service firms, from 2009 to 2018.Design/methodology/approachThe data presented in this paper cover responses from 802 small service firms, which were collected through telephone and online questionnaires. In order to have sufficient data on strategic outsourcing and to ensure a decent analysis, three surveys were combined.FindingsThe main finding of the present paper is that SMEs that have a developed strategy on outsourcing seem to perform better than those who do not have. The former are more likely to have achieved cost reduction, especially in housing and finance, and they use outsourcing to increase core businesses. They select vendor firms more on the bases of cost and services, rather than personal contacts. Also, these firms have improved service quality, by focusing on their core competences.Originality/valueTo the authors‘ knowledge, the present study is one of the few empirical studies that have examined outsourcing in SMEs from a strategic perspective. The findings are valuable for managerial practice and could be a base for outsourcing strategies in SMEs.

PVOPM: Verifiable Privacy-preserving Pattern Matching with Efficient Outsourcing in the Malicious Setting

Outsourced pattern matching delegates the task of finding all positions pattern $P$ P appears in text $T$ T to the cloud from resource-constrained devices. Unfortunately, it has brought a series of security and privacy issues. Most of the state-of-the-art either disclosed text/pattern privacy or exploited the computationally-intensive techniques of public key fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), commitment schemes and zero knowledge proof to achieve both text/pattern privacy and verifiability. To address these issues, as a building block, an efficient privacy preserving verifiable outsourced discrete fourier transform protocol OVFT is first devised based on any one-way trapdoor permutation (OWTP). Based on OVFT, we propose an efficient secure verifiable outsourced polynomial multiplication protocol OPVML which is further exploited in designing our final protocol PVOPM for verifiable privacy-preserving outsourced pattern matching. Without exploiting public key FHE, the proposed PVOPM achieves both verifiability and text/pattern privacy against the collusion between the cloud and malicious receiver/sender, by generating authentication proofs of constant size and executing constant times of any one-way trapdoor permutation, independent to both the text size $n$ n and the pattern size $m$ m . Finally, formal security proof under universal composable (UC) model and extensive evaluations demonstrate the efficiency and practicability of our proposed PVOPM.

Building Information Modeling (BIM) outsourcing among general contractors

Abstract Building Information Modeling (BIM) is a process used by Architecture Engineering Construction (AEC) stakeholders which simulates a construction project in a multi-dimensional digital model and provides multitudes of project benefits from project inception to its occupancy. However, a variety of barriers impede a holistic BIM implementation. Due to these barriers, some general contractors outsource the creation and use of BIM models to specialized Information Technology (IT) firms. Since limited literature currently exists for BIM outsourcing, this study aims to identify BIM outsourcing patterns among the general contractors across the US and the perceived impacts it has on construction projects. Analysis of two-hundred and fifty-two complete responses from general contracting firms determines that 45% of responding companies have outsourced BIM, this signifies that outsourcing has become an important facet of BIM implementation. Data was also collected on company demographics, BIM outsourcing locations, strategic reasons for outsourcing, and various other aspects related to BIM outsourcing. The results indicate that respondents perceive BIM outsourcing as less efficient than in-house BIM implementation. However, continued use of outsourcing for BIM functions also displays the adaptability of the industry in meeting challenges and embracing new technology through alternative methods, despite the potential risks.

The biased pattern of global outsourcing

In this paper, we examine the relationship between service offshoring and overall wage inequality in the U.S. labor market. Using data from CPS, EU KLEMS, and WIOD, we find that service offshoring shows a biased pattern on wage inequality in that it would affect largely a certain class who work in the service sector, not all sectors. Specifically, service offshoring would enlarge both the 90/10 and 90/50 wage gaps in the service sector. This implies that it can substitute in part for the middle-skill group in the service sector, reducing the relative skill premium of the corresponding workers

Outsourced pattern matching

In secure delegatable computation, computationally weak devices (or clients) wish to outsource their computation and data to an untrusted server in the cloud. While most earlier work considers the general question of how to securely outsource any computation to the cloud server, we focus on concrete and important functionalities and give the first protocol for the pattern matching problem in the cloud. Loosely speaking, this problem considers a text T that is outsourced to the cloud $${\textsc {S}}$$ by a sender $${\textsc {SEN}}$$ . In a query phase, receivers $${\textsc {REC}}_1, \ldots , {\textsc {REC}}_l$$ run an efficient protocol with the server $${\textsc {S}}$$ and the sender $${\textsc {SEN}}$$ in order to learn the positions at which a pattern of length m matches the text (and nothing beyond that). This is called the outsourced pattern matching problem which is highly motivated in the context of delegatable computing since it offers storage alternatives for massive databases that contain confidential data (e.g., health-related data about patient history). Our constructions are simulation-based secure in the presence of semi-honest and malicious adversaries (in the random oracle model) and limit the communication in the query phase to O(m) bits plus the number of occurrences—which is optimal. In contrast to generic solutions for delegatable computation, our schemes do not rely on fully homomorphic encryption but instead use novel ideas for solving pattern matching, based on a reduction to the subset sum problem. Interestingly, we do not rely on the hardness of the problem, but rather we exploit instances that are solvable in polynomial time. A follow-up result demonstrates that the random oracle is essential in order to meet our communication bound.

How Does Competition Affect Product Choices? An Empirical Analysis of the U.S. Airline Industry

This paper studies major airlines' choice of whether or not to outsource operations to regional airlines across routes and over time. Using panel data of the U.S. airline industry, we find significant differences on the pattern of outsourcing to regional airlines depending on whether the major airlines operate their own major fleets on the route as well. Our results suggest that if HHI increases by 0:1, the log likelihood of a major airline choosing complete outsourcing relative to no outsourcing, goes up by 3.3%. This log likelihood goes down by 5.8% if the major airline's market share increases by 0.1. In contrast, the log likelihood of partial outsourcing relative to no outsourcing goes down by 16.7% if HHI goes up by 0.1, and goes up by 17.8% if the major airline's market share goes up by 0.1. Taking into account the ownership of regional airlines, we find that when facing more LCC competition, major airlines are more likely to rely on wholly owned subsidiaries relative to independent regional airlines. This lends support to the commonly held view that major airlines rely on regional airlines to compete with LCCs. We also investigate how major airlines adjust their prices when facing either LCC entry threat or actual entry. For carrier-routes with no outsourcing, we find that major airlines do not respond in prices to either threat of or actual LCC entry. In contrast, on carrier-routes with partial outsourcing, major airlines lower their prices by about 5.2% one quarter after LCC entry, with no adjustments in other periods.

Cloud based outsourced pattern matching infrastructure for face recognition and currency note validation

Cloud based outsourced pattern matching infrastructure for face recognition and currency note validation

Modernizing State Support of Nonprofit Service Provision: The Case of Kyrgyzstan

This paper examines a recent effort to reform the laws on outsourcing to nonprofit organizations in the Central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan. To do so, it first examines Kyrgyzstan’s pattern of outsourcing during the era of Soviet control of the country. It then examines early post-Soviet efforts to establish an effective system of outsourcing to nonprofits and the difficulties that these early efforts encountered. Finally, it looks in more detail at a major effort to reform this system undertaken during 2014 and 2015 and draws some significant lessons for the redesign of contracting and outsourcing provisions that are relevant not only for former Soviet countries but more generally as well.

Modeling and Verification for Cross-Department Collaborative Business Processes Using Extended Petri Nets

Recently, cross-department business processes are becoming more and more complex. Different kinds of coordination patterns exist among different departments, which make modeling and analysis work more difficult. To our best knowledge, there is no formal method to give systematic modeling and verification for the cross-department processes when considering different kinds of coordination patterns among different departments. This paper proposes such a method based on Petri nets. The WF-net model extended with resource and message factors, RM_WF_Net for short, is first introduced. Then, the formal model of tasks is proposed and its coordination relations are given. Next, RM_WF_Net modeling for intradepartment processes is investigated and cross-department coordination patterns, including message interaction pattern, resource interaction pattern, task collaboration pattern, procedure abstract, service outsourcing pattern, and process activation pattern, are formally defined. The soundness of the RM_WF_Net is verified based on the reachability graph. A running case of the cross-department medical diagnosis business process is given to validate our proposed method.

Nonprofit Outsourcing Patterns: Why Don’t Small NPOs Outsource More?

Nonprofit organizations (NPOs) serve a unique purpose, filling gaps left by governments and for-profits. NPOs have the potential to do a lot of good in their communities. However, these organizations are often resource-constrained, both financially and in terms of human capital. Furthermore, NPOs are often judged on the ratio of administration costs to program costs. For these reasons, personnel in small NPOs are often diverted from the organization’s mission to administrative functions. Outsourcing, as research has shown in for-profits, offers the opportunity to refocus human capital to the mission cost effectively. However, there is little research on outsourcing for small NPOs. This study focuses on small NPOs in regard to outsourcing administrative functions. The study found that small NPOs often use staff time and board resources on administrative functions to keep costs down and may not understand the benefits of outsourcing.

Research on Power System Communication Operation and Maintenance Outsourcing Model

With the using of power system communication and information technology more widely, operation and maintenance services to support integrated, large-scale, professional management presented a greater challenge, how to find a better balance point in their operation and maintenance and service outsourcing will be the key issue. Conducted from IT Operation Outsourcing Management Development profiles, patterns, application scenarios and trends multi-dimensional studies, and in-depth analysis of the power system operation and maintenance outsourcing management characteristics, laid the theoretical foundation for the future development of the operation and maintenance of communication and information systems outsourcing management.