What are the advantages of outsourcing vs. in-house production?
Matthew Osborne, marketing director, Osborne Wood Products: Some advantages of outsourcing are production control, lower overhead, expanded growth and low cost of handling defective product. Our facility was busting at the seams and for us to produce more product, we needed to either expand our physical size or have others produce our product. We chose to outsource. Since we specialize in short runs and custom work, we found vendors that had production-oriented machinery to be a complementary match. They can produce our high-volume products at a lower cost than we could. We also found we could expand the scope of our business as our contacts could make products that we are unable to make here. Finally, we found that with outsourcing, defective products would simply be fixed or replaced controlling an important source of lost revenue. Steve Lawser, executive director, Wood Component Mfrs. Assn. (WCMA): According to previous make vs. buy studies, the No. 1 reason to outsource components
