Outsourcing according to Wikipedia refers to ‘the process of contracting to a third party’. The outsourcing industry in Malaysia has grown so much due to government support and increased industry expertise. Its multi-cultural and multi-lingual strengths have also attracted business companies from Asian markets, South East Asia, and the Middle East. Malaysia has a booming service sector, shifting from its production-based economy to a rapidly expanding economy dependent on education and service. Malaysia benefits from its strategic location, its global integration, and its well-educated workforce. India maybe the leading nation for supplying outsourcing services, but Malaysia is not too far off and is placed on the second tier of outsourcing nations with countries like China and The Philippines. Statistics have shown that Malaysian outsourcing industry is predicted to be worth $2 billion by 2012 justifying that most organisations are moving towards acquiring outsourcing services.
Outsourcing can be in the form of bookkeeping and accounting, IT solutions, payroll, HR, consultancy and many more. Outsourcing helps organisations to manage costs and run operations smoothly especially for the smaller organisations. Although it costs money, the primary reason for outsourcing is to cut costs. In addition, entrepreneurs in smaller organisations particularly have a lot of responsibilities and tasks to handle and by outsourcing; they would free their time to work on higher priority tasks such as to increase sales. It is always good to outsource tasks that will take up your time and effort to handle but will take an expert less time to do it. Your business would not be able to survive, let alone succeed if you are busy spending time on tasks that do not really grow your business. It may take longer time, potentially more frustrating and subsequently cost you more.
Outsourcing your shredding function is no different to any other outsourcing services offered in the market. By outsourcing your shredding needs, not only you reduce employees’ time wasted on shredding themselves, you would not have to invest in shredding machines and maintenance fees associated with it. It is less expensive to outsource shredding function than shredding it yourselves. The only way that having your own shredder is less expensive is if your employees do not use it i.e. no shredding is done. An office with just a few employees can generate over 50 kilos of paper every month. That means many hours spent feeding a few sheets at a time into a small office shredder. In most small and medium sized offices, employees are already overwhelmed with work. It is not practical to expect that a busy employee is going to devotedly go through the time-consuming inconvenience of arduously putting everything they should destroy through a slow office shredder. More often than not, whenever they place the materials near the shredder, someone often decides to throw them out to avoid the hassle and mess. Even if an office shredder could keep up with large volumes of daily shredding, which it does not, what happens when you have to destroy more records than normal? Maybe you are cleaning old records out of storage or someone just cleans out their office. Even the slightest surge in the amount of material to be destroyed creates a nightmare for employees.
The next issue is whether you can trust your employees? When your employees do the shredding, 2 scenarios exist. You either have entry-level employees, in which case you may expose sensitive personnel records and competitive information to individuals not meant to see it, or management-level employees, who are especially busy and paid huge money to do more important work, to do the shredding. Neither situation should be acceptable in any organisations.
Hence, when is the best time to outsource your shredding function? The answer is as soon as you can. It will not only help your business to grow but also protects your business.
