Sustainable outsourcing in Italian SMEs

The aim of the paper is to understand how sustainable outsourcing can be an opportunity for Italian SMEs. In the new millennium outsourcing and offshoring have by now become the standard for firms constantly in search of new frontiers in order to compete worldwide. Quinn e Hilmer (1994) have clearly summarized the benefits of outsourcing in a strategic perspective. With outsourcing the manager optimizes the company's resources in four main ways: 1. maximizing the efficiency of internal resources by focusing on investments and engaging in core competencies; 2. Developing core competencies by building barriers to current or future competitors seeking to enter the areas of interest of the enterprise, thus protecting competitive advantages; 3. Using the investments of external firms, their innovations, their skills and their specializations, that could be kept in house with continuous investment and innovation; 4. reducing the risks in rapidly changing markets with high technologies; an outsourcing strategy reduces the risks of technological upgrading and R&D costs by shortening production cycles and making the response to customer needs more flexible and quick. The goal often becomes to redefine the core competencies and to distinguish between core and non-core competencies by outsourcing activities and processes that are not considered part of the core business (Pellicelli, 2009). In this way companies can potentially be more efficient and effective in the global market. This is necessary but it’s not enough to be competitive. Firms are facing growing stakeholders demand for social and environmental sustainability goals (Mella, Gazzola, 2004). Therefore sustainability has an increasing role in outsourcing strategies. In a competitive and technological environment, that is vaster and more dynamic than in the past, firms must deal with complexity and turn to new strategies (Becker, Zirpoli, 2017; Doval 2016) to build long term sustainable competitive advantages, not only for big corporation but also for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). They need to pursue sustainability in order to win a good reputation as socially responsible. Sustainability is essential for a business and remain 138 competitive, many companies choose to outsource some of the creative, analytical and administrative work to a knowledge process outsourcing provider. Sustainable outsourcing is one way for small and medium enterprises to be flexible. Outsourcing is more than a cost-saving measure for businesses. Based on the definition of sustainable supply chain management (Carter, Rogers, 2008; Seuring, Müller, 2008), Li et al (2014) define “sustainable outsourcing as the strategic integration and achievement of a firm’s social, environmental and economic goals in its sourcing to a third party entity”. However sustainability in this field is little investigated and sustainable or green outsourcing are studied connected with Information Technology (Beath, Ross, 2006; Bhamra, 2012). In the paper we propose an approach based on the qualitative and quantitative analysis of the Small and Medium Enterprises in Italy.