How Differs Outsourcing of Core and Supportive Activities in Slovenian SMEs

Companies are facing increasing and faster changes on the market, including globalization, shortening of life cycles, complexity of products, intensive technological development. Achieving and maintaining competitiveness can be done with different strategies and tools. One of them is also outsourcing. Outsourcing is widespread throughout the world and represents a commonly accepted business practice. An important feature of outsourcing is that it is determined by several characteristics at the same time. Since outsourcing is a multidimensional phenomenon, we examined it’s most important and distinctive dimensions, including share of outsourcing particular activity, duration of the outsourcing contract, and number, size and location of outsourcing providers. For the purpose of research we have examined which activities are companies outsourcing and divide them on core and supportive activities. On this ground we studied differences in particular characteristics between those two groups of activities. The paper is based on empirical study of 154 Slovenian SMEs concluded in 2008. Its findings are presented in the paper.