For years, outsourcing came down to a cost decision. Run the numbers, pick a provider, move on. The easy math no longer holds: companies are outsourcing more than ever, and most of them still aren't happy with the result.
In this episode, Ellen Wood sits down with Bernd Müller-Dauppert of Miebach, who co-authored the firm's new outsourcing study, Outsourcing Under Pressure. He makes the case that the real risk today isn't cost or quality. It's how dependent you become on a provider once the contract is signed. He also gets into why automation and data demands have changed the math, why only about half of these projects actually pay off, and what the companies that get it right do differently.
In this episode:
- Why dependence and the lock-in effect now rank as the single biggest outsourcing risk — well ahead of cost
- How automation and data-quality demands quietly rewrite the economics of the outsource-or-not decision
- Why most of a project’s success or failure is locked in before operations ever begin
- When a hybrid model — insource what’s critical, outsource what scales — beats betting on either extreme
