Cathay Pacific Case Analysis 10/25/2007
Cathay Pacific (CP) is an interesting case because it is an example of a company attempting to work in isolation, vertically integrated and developing all their needs themselves. Truth is however; in today’s interconnected economy a company working independently simply can not compete. The world has become too dynamic and contains too many other companies developing better solutions to rely solely on one’s internal organization. Cathay eventually recognized this fact and turned to outsourcing to focus on its core competency, customer service and transportation.
Outsourcing should only be implemented when a company’s core competitive advantages are not affected and then when
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As a manager, deciding whether to use third party solutions that impact your core competencies, those cost savings benefits must outweigh the investments costs.
IBM becoming involved is a similar situation, the economy as a whole receives cost savings, which CP receives a portion of, but also competitors can immediately match those savings. When IBM took over the data centers in Sydney, it allowed IBM to import best practices from across the globe and also allowed the full capacity of the data centers to be utilized by serving additional clients. Best practices bring lower costs to an operation and higher capacity usage brings greater revenue, all good things but again CP only gets a portion and IBM receives the rest.
While costs and benefits are the ultimate management decisions, a coherent strategy from management allows IT professionals to more accurately estimate these value decisions. This is the critical area where CP made its mistakes. Due to the financial situations caused from 9/11, the new airport and China taking back Hong Kong; CP shifted to survival mode and cut costs by outsourcing indiscriminately. This damaged the company a few years later, because many of those decisions were reversed with the EVOLVE IT strategy.
Ultimately, CP did a poor IT job because all they did was recognize a problem, escalating
Approach of outsourcing should be followed when there is a lack of expertise required for the development of that project. Outsourcing comes with huge number of
I would advise Hudson to continue analyzing company operations as relates to IT and look for changes to functions. I would constantly be reevaluating these IT functions for their “core”
Despite that an excessively excellent image of outsourcing was provided to individuals one or two of years back, the truth check they were confronted with shattered the dream badly. Recent statistics reveal that over four-hundredth corporations are concerned either in experimenting or are already engaged in shifting their services overseas in search of low-cost labor and services that are being provided by countries like China and Bharat. Such efforts have left native market labor at extreme disadvantage wherever they're finding it vastly tedious to create each ends meet, leave behind the back-breaking burden of taxes they're being obligatory to. With over four-hundredth major company executives registering their opinion by discouraging the method of outsourcing the controversy that was antecedently being won by the
The dawn of the outsourcing era. Many large U.S. corporations cultivates outsourcing faster than we can imagine. The trend that began in the late 1970 and picked up speed in the 1900s with the opening trade with China, India, and Eastern Europe (“Outsourcing: What’s the true Impact”). In its broadest sense, outsourcing is simply contracting out functions that had been done in-house—a longtime U.S. practice (“Globalization: Threat or Opportunity”). Subsequently, outsourcing is an essential part of globalization; and it is the combination of markets through the cooperation of internalization, federal, and state governments with corporate companies to produce products on a reduce production cost, and offer services on lower labor cost. When a U.S. manufacture product, and buys material from an intermediate supplier from out of the country rather than producing them in-house, that is what is called outsourcing. Also, when U.S. corporation hires outside contractor out-of-the-country to do U.S. call center services for less labor cost that is outsourcing. When a company deals out its operational task, such as payroll, accounting, and software operations that is outsourcing. Obviously, all of these examples seem to benefit and in favor of the corporations. To get the clear understanding of outsourcing for major corporation perspective, I have interviewed IKEA’s U.S. Deputy Retail Country Manager Rob Olson about outsourcing—Swedish
After analyzing all these risks and criteria Id like to present some points to demonstrate why we should go for outsourcing:
Because of the limitations and failures of this process, VPs were frustrated with the fact that everything with IT took longer than promised. On the other side, IT blamed the business for their lack of prioritization and planning about the projects. The lack of coordination in this situation was not sustainable in the future because the stability of the relationship between IT and the business units was in danger.
The IT folks couldn’t communicate properly with the business about their ideas and strategy that confused the business and made them reject the ideas that were actually worth trying.
For making outsourcing decisions, management increased short-term cost benefits, while cutting their spending in fundamental research. These executives where listening to business leader and Wall Street’s advice to “focus on your core competencies, off-load your low-value-added activities, and redeploy the savings to innovation, the true source of your competitive advantage” (2009). Their manager were saying that they could go back to their original plan if the quality or work did not meet their standards, if the expected cost savings were justified, if supply-chain risks were extreme, or if the work was too complicated. Management’s poor decisions did not foresee the damage that outsourcing had caused, since they were more interested on the payoffs they were getting.
Knight Capital missed warning signs. It has emerged that there were red flags that went ignored. Knight needs to understand they cannot rest on the laurels of their software and programs. The base of the IS/IT infrastructure relies on hardware, software and dedicated IT, but at the top, a firm needs the proper
Outsourcing has become a very controversial topic, particularly around the time of presidential elections. The working public has a very different view of outsourcing than the business owners, partly due to information asymmetry. In other words, the working public does not typically have all of the information regarding the impacts of outsourcing available to them as business owners do. Reversely, business owners are not able to see the impacts of outsourcing on the working public and therefore, do not consider those impacts when restructuring their companies. The interpretations of these impacts, however, determine whether they are costs or benefits to the person interpreting them.
The issues that Alcan was facing were numerous to say the least. The fact that the leadership in the IT side had been vacant for more than a year was very problematic. Another large chunk of the infrastructure issue revolved around how decentralized the business groups that made up Alcan were. “Every business group was completely independent, with its own strategic IT plan, infrastructure choices based on its specific needs, and IT applications and services. Each group had its own IT organization that pursued its objectives based on the group’s needs and orientation. Groups’ needs, like their activities, were highly diversified. Over the years, this culture of autonomy had been reinforced by mergers and acquisitions” (Bernier & Dube & Roy, 2009). Another issue that was identified was that Alcan had more than one thousand information systems, and many of these systems managed information that was financial. It completely makes it difficult to comprehend how you would even attempt to be able to work with over 1,000 systems within Alcan. Another identified issue was that there was a problem with accessible skills which were insufficient, and crudely positioned to meet requirements of the information technology infrastructure. This also resulted in these needs not being evaluated, identified, or even compensated in a similar way as other various business groups. Instead the outsourced providers instead minimized the deficiencies
The company did not perform as well as they should have been able to. There were multiple areas where problems arose, such as the technical architecture of the IT system, relying only on the 3rd party, Qdata, to monitor their IT infrastructure, keeping out of date manuals, and not maintaining their emergency procedures.
I can conclude after evaluating the advantages and disadvantages of managing physical and technological resources and cost and budget I can say that it is in the best interest of a business to manage it's physical and technological resources as it will improve the overall performance of the business. In addition to that the business will gain the complete advantage of the resources. Furthermore the business will reduce cost and the resources will last longer for the business. It is in the utmost advantage of a business to manage it cost and budget. For a business who manages it costs and budgets will receive huge benefits. The business will increase its income and reduce it expenses. So therefore this will improve the overall performance of the business. In addition to that the business shareholders would receive high dividends at the end of the trading year for the business. This will then encourage the shareholders to invest money in the business which would the business grow and improve the success of the
In 1989, outsourcing was formally identified as a business strategy that would increase a company’s markets and profits. The idea of outsourcing involves subcontracting manufacturing jobs such as IT and engineering design to foreign companies. Even though the term outsourcing has been recently introduced, the concept has been around for quite some time now. Outsourcing had promised to create more jobs and a better life for Americans. In reality, outsourcing, despite insourcing, has hurt far more American job holders and job seekers than they have helped. Instead of creating more jobs for Americans, it has created more jobs for non-Americans and left many unemployed. Only a few people have benefited from outsourcing: company executives, shareholders, and consulting firms.
In a study which got widely cited too, Grover (1996) identified three categories of target outcomes from outsourcing namely (i) economic (cost savings) ,(ii) technological and (iii) strategic. While these indicators being very truly valid alone is not sufficient enough unless otherwise inherently combined to exist with a multi-stakeholder perspective to result in offering enduring satisfaction levels to the