Is in house IT an expensive luxury for logistics industries by Steven Hargreaves of Solarsoft

The current economic climate should be seen as a prime opportunity by the UK’s logistics industry to relinquish the high overheads and poor control associated with in-house IT.

Recession-beating strategies demand a clear focus on core skills, which means there is simply no leeway in the budget to support non-core services such as IT.

Logistics industries need to retain those individuals that offer skills essential to the business, those that will deliver the innovation and operational know-how required to ride out the financial storm. The IT department, in contrast, is built on skills that an external organisation can easily supply.

With the arrival of modern web-based solutions and good bandwidth, there is no need for the systems and their attendants to be located in-house – enterprise level systems can be delivered and managed highly successfully from a remote site. It is time to think of IT as a utility and replace the in-house service with a supplier that can deliver full systems management, whilst reducing costs by up to 30%.

The time for debate is over and the IT choice is clear. Outsourced solutions will deliver efficiency and flexibility. Most of all, they give the logistics industry the freedom to focus on what matters most in any market: winning business.