Improving Outsourcing: Leveraging Value Stream Mapping for Service Contract Process
摘要
Outsourcing involves a wide range of activities, allowing companies to use partner services to focus efforts on their core competencies, reduce operational costs, and increase efficiency by delegating non-essential activities to specialized partners. In this context, aiming to explore methods to assist in the development of the outsourcing service contracting process and seeking techniques to facilitate both the creation and improvement of this practice, it was observed that Value Stream Mapping can be an effective tool for this purpose, due to its visual clarity and other facilitations. The present study aimed to verify the contribution of Value Stream Mapping as a support tool in elaborating the outsourcing service contracting process. For this purpose, the current processes of four large companies were studied using information from four respective focus groups selected. Based on this premise, a fifth focus group was formed, composed of a representative from each company, to create a hypothetical outsourcing service contracting process using Value Stream Mapping as a basis. The main contribution is the proposition of a process validated by experts and based on the best practices of the four studied companies, demonstrating that Value Stream Mapping can be a valuable tool for creating this process and contributing to another study regarding the use of Value Stream Mapping for a non-productive process.