OMS SafeHarbor

Outsourcing and the end of the company store

From the U.S. Mail’s Pony Express all the way to today’s FedEx, getting content from point A to point B has been an outsourced service. So why are so many companies still doing their own digital fulfillment? From elaborate corporate storefronts to plain old FTP sites, there’s still a vast amount of low hanging OpEx fruit in the area of digital fulfillment. Products, training, advertising, documents, images, videos the list goes on anon. IT systems to manage, release, publish, license, package, configure, install, store, backup, etc., are often redundant for different functional groups.

Do you manufacture your own boxes, use unique addressing algorithms, develop your own tracking system, and utilize your company’s networks, computers and storage to fulfill physically addressed packages? Not when you get that service from FedEx or UPS or even, dare we say it, the U.S. Postal Service! From the moment a piece of physical equipment rolls off the assembly line or hit the mailroom it is whisked to your customer via tools and transport provided by shipping and freight forwarding experts. And why do you do this? Because it is less expensive, quicker and more efficient to use experts to perform these tasks! So, why do you own a Googleplex of expensive, proprietary, quickly depreciating, nightmare of fulfillment support infrastructure? You hear the dire warnings in the budget meetings; Our content is too unique, our releases are too complex, our packaging is too customized, our customers are trained to use our homespun storefronts for their digital content. Ignore this “we’re special” mantra; It’s not true.

The trend away from expensive, internally developed processes for digital content began years ago. Now, with shrinking operating budgets and dwindling resources, the speed of the transition is increasing. The care and feeding of homegrown employee-to-consumer digital fulfillment infrastructure is no longer viable. Getting digital content from your employee’s desktop to the consumer is not your core corporate competency, its ours. Give us a call, we’ll show you.