offshoring

Offshoring is the relocation of a business process from one country to another—typically an operational process, such as manufacturing, or supporting processes, such as accounting. Usually this refers to a company business, although state governments may also employ offshoring. More recently, technical and administrative services have been offshored.

Offshoring neither implies nor precludes involving a different company to be responsible for a business process. Therefore, offshoring should not be confused with outsourcing which does imply one company relying on another. In practice, the concepts can be intertwined, i.e offshore outsourcing, and can be individually or jointly, partially or completely reversed, as described by terms such as reshoring, inshoring, and insourcing. In-house offshoring is when the offshored work is done by means of an internal (captive) delivery model. Imported services from subsidiaries or other closely related suppliers are included, whereas intermediate goods, such as partially completed cars or computers, may not be.