The STM/Academic segment has been the avant-garde in outsourcing and offshoring its production services. Starting with outsourcing locally, publishing companies soon set-up captives (shared services subsidiaries) in low cost geographies such as India.
As an offshore extension of operations, captives soon ceased to provide the edge - in terms of cost, expertise and management. Outsourcing gave way to offshoring, and STM/Academic service providers are probably the most mature when dealing with outsourced (and offshored) publishing work.
Offshoring and outsourcing in the STM/Academic segment started In the UK with Macmillan setting up their captive in India. However, over the years several US-based publishing companies have started outsourcing and offshoring. Some of the top buyers of outsourcing services in the STM/Academic segment include Springer, Elsevier, Pearson, Macmillan, Wiley, Oxford University Press, and a whole range of mid-small publishing companies in the US and UK.
Since outsourcing as well as offshoring is quite well-entrenched in the business model of the publishers operating in the STM/Academic segment, it is of immense interest to understand and analyze buyer sentiments with respect to outsourcing. An insight into buyer sentiment will help us answer a few questions like:
- What are the challenges faced by the industry and how has the industry changed in terms of perceived challenges?
- What are the satisfaction levels with outsourced/offshored services?
- What are the areas that still need improvement?
- What is the buyer proclivity to outsource? Will smaller companies outsource more? The following chapters delve deeper into all these aspects.
- How has the industry shaped up in terms of functional areas outsourced? For example, is there more demand for content (implying higher value services) or production (low value high volume services)?
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- 1 Foreword
- 2 Research Methodology
- 2.1 Who took the survey?
- 2.2 Respondent break-down by company’s employee strength
- 2.3 Respondent break-down by company revenues
- 2.4 Respondent break-down by geography
- 2.5 Demography of Buyer respondents - STM/Academic
- 2.6 Where are the STM/Academic respondents from?
- 2.7 Interest by smaller publishers
- 3 STM Industry - Brief Background
- 3.1 History of outsourcing in STM/Academic publishing
- 4 Challenges faced by STM publishers
- 4.1 What are the perceived challenges for STM publishers?
- 4.1.1 Outsourcing can make up for lack of in-house capabilities
- 4.1.2 Technology - not a very strong driver
- 4.1.3 Does size impact the perception of “key challenge?”
- 4.2 Understanding outsourcing sentiments
- 4.3 Can outsourcing mitigate challenges - which ones?
- 5 Satisfaction levels and expectations
- 5.1 Perceived cost savings - buyer perceptions
- 5.1.1 US and UK publishers’ perceptions
- 5.1.2 Publisher vs. management perceptions
- 5.1.3 Vendor perceptions on cost savings
- 5.1.4 Are buyers satisfied?
- 5.2 What are the improvement areas?
- 5.2.1 Improvement required in quality - View by revenues of respondents
- 5.2.2 Improvement required in quality - View by geography
- 5.2.3 Attention across all areas - view by profile
- 6 Will outsourcing grow?
- 6.1 Proclivity to outsource
- 6.2 Where will the growth from?
- 6.2.1 Which publishers (by size) will drive offshore growth?
- 6.2.2 Which geography will increase outsourcing, which will retard?
- 6.2.3 Where will increased sourcing come from?
- 6.3 Preferred sourcing destinations
- 6.4 Which services will be in demand?
- 7 How will things shape up?
- 7.1 Service provider checklist
- 7.2 Buyer checklist
- 8 Annexure
- 8.1 Sourcing Prism
- 9 About ValueNotes
- 9.1 Research Publications
- 9.2 Recent Custom Projects
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