Outsourcing – Ett verktyg för resurseffektivitet?

Sammanfattning: Abstract Outsourcing is a business strategy that has developed over the last 40 years. Outsourcing means to let another company do some activity within the company, for example production. The thesis for this paper is: How is outsourcing used in a manufacturing company today and how is the resource efficiency affected by it? The research is divided into two parts, a theoretical part and an empirical part. The theoretical part consists of a study of literature. The works in this study is books, text books, bachelor thesis paper and scientific articles. The empirical part consists of two interviews with two companies, Ostnor AB and Atlas Copco Industrial Technique AB. Ostnor is a Swedish company that makes sanitary fittings under the brands FM Mattsson and Mora. Atlas Copco Industrial Technique is a company in the Swedish Atlas Copco concern that makes industrial tools for several industries, like the automotive and electronics industries. These companies are at interest for the report because Ostnor has had a part of their production outsourced to China for about ten years and have now moved everything back to Sweden. Atlas Copco Industrial Technique is a larger company that has many outsourcing initiatives and a lot of experience in the subject. The interview with Ostnor was done with CEO Clas Seldeby and the interview with Atlas Copco Industrial Technique was with the Head of Strategic Sourcing Henrik Eriksson. There are a few definitions connected to the outsourcing area. Some of them are outsourcing, offshore-outsourcing, sub-contracting and insourcing. When deciding about issues concerning outsourcing a decision model can be used to make sure that all aspects have been taken into consideration. There are several advantages and disadvantages with outsourcing. Two advantages are that costs can be reduced and being able to focuse more on the company’s core competency. Two disadvantages are that sensitive information could leak and less control of the production process. The interviews showed that some parts of the theoretical concepts surrounding outsourcing can be linked to reality. We found that taking home production is not a trend but that it follows the business cycle. Outsourcing is used today as a tool for companies to make better use of resources and to reduce costs. Companies see outsourcing as a possibility to improve flows in the production process and overall improvements in the company. This is also connected to how the resource efficiency is affected. When making improvements in production, a company can make changes to improve the resource efficiency in several ways. By implementing new machinery, improving the production flow and make better use of space and production lines the company can improve the usage of resources to be more efficient. If outsourcing is used in the wrong way i.e. just using to reduce costs it can affect the efficiency negatively if there is no plan to improve it. This happens when a company takes short-term decisions.