Description

Outsourcing Human Resources Activities of a Multinational Company in Europe. That is indeed exactly what this whole master thesis is about. Human Resources, because we found quite fascinating the fact that still too many managers have at the same time a hard time defining the real essence of the Human Resources department of their own company and nevertheless blindly support the fact that Human Resources management is absolutely necessary to their success. Outsourcing, because we have been rapidly convinced that it is one of the best way to understand and drive businesses of the future. The outsourcing strategy stands somewhere between customer relationship management and strategic alliances, allowing it to take advantage of the market to a much greater extent than the market dictates to it. The Multinational Company in Europe finally, because it specifies to whom and where our thesis applies in particular; because a company set up throughout Europe is still on the one hand necessarily a multinational company, but is inevitably facing on the other hand the tangible and remarkable European integration process that impacts its business more and more as a whole. In order to clarify and encompass as much as possible the meanderings of our topic, we thought four main parts would be necessary. We chose to start, in the first part, with taking stock of the situation, as far as the outsourcing phenomenon and the Human Resources department practices are concerned, to finally come to an overview of the Human Resources activities outsourcing industry. After extensively laying out the needed scope and definitions of our thesis, we step back a little, in order to understand the underlying stakes of a Human Resources outsourcing strategy. We then begin with key points of the business environment that lead to such an approach, following with the description of the new challenges faced by Human Resources departments, and finally ending with a clear vision of what is really meant by a Human Resources outsourcing strategy. Next to fill in the theory with more pragmatic details, the third part present the different practical key issues resulting from the implementation of such a Human Resources outsourcing strategy; that is to say, we describe and analyze the different steps involved in putting into practice such a solution, highlighting the specificities of the European environment. Finally, the fourth and last part supports our analysis with several topical case studies, first of all describing Human Resources outsourcing strategies of some multinational companies around the world, and then sharing experiences of some of the first providers of such a service. In the end, our focus is on the IBM Europe case, a case that we have been given the chance to follow quite closely since July 2001.