KNOXVILLE — Kate Vitasek, a faculty member in the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s Center for Executive Education (CEE), is now teaching the nation’s only course in “Vested Outsourcing” — a methodology that she developed with the CEE to help companies get a better return on their outsourcing investments.
Vitasek, a UT Knoxville alumna, lives in Washington state and travels to Knoxville several times a year to teach the new Vested Outsourcing course on campus and travels elsewhere to teach customized versions at company locations. For the past four years, she’s taught courses in contracting, logistics and outsourcing at UT.
Vested Outsourcing — which is currently being piloted by such Fortune 100 companies as Microsoft and Intel — is steeped in research funded by the U.S. Air Force, which has studied some of the most progressive outsourcing relationships by the world’s leading companies. Vitasek and her colleagues coined the term “Vested Outsourcing” because it involves a fundamental shift in how both the supplier and vendor in outsourcing relationships must be vested to ignite innovation, improve service, lower costs and increase profit.
Vitasek’s team identified the top 10 flaws in most outsourced business models and then developed five rules to help companies rethink their outsourcing relationships in a way that will lower costs, improve service and increase innovation.
“At its heart, Vested Outsourcing is about structuring the outsourcing agreements and its economics around achieving desired outcomes rather than a transaction-based approach,” Vitasek said. “Vested Outsourcing uses properly aligned incentives that encourage all parties in the business arrangement to unlock the most efficient and effective solutions to the work being performed.”
Experts within the outsourcing industry predict that Vested Outsourcing will change the industry.
“In the outsourcing world, a genuinely new concept comes along only once every 10 years or so. I believe Vested Outsourcing is one of them,” said Cliff Lynch, author of “Logistics Outsourcing: A Management Guide.”
Frank Casale, CEO of the Outsourcing Institute, added, “Vested Outsourcing is a game-changing approach that will quickly become the new gold standard for advanced outsourcing relationships.”
Vitasek’s book about Vested Outsourcing, “Vested Outsourcing: Five Rules That Will Transform Outsourcing” — based on a research study conducted with UT and the U.S. Air Force — is being released today, Feb. 2.
For more information about Vested Outsourcing and the courses that Vitasek teaches for UT, see http://vo.utk.edu.
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C O N T A C T :
Cindy Raines (865-974-4359, craines1@utk.edu)