The business case passed every review. The center opened, or the provider was signed, or the work moved. The dashboard is mostly green. And the operation is not doing what the model said it would.

You know the shape of it because one of these is on your desk. The savings the case promised never reached the P&L. A station or a country quietly pulled work back from the center because the escalations were easier to handle locally. A technology rollout stalled because the operation underneath it was not ready. Attrition in the center is running well above what the best operators sustain. The business calls the shared service a black hole, because nobody can say where a problem goes once it enters. And if you run the center rather than commission it, your internal partners want value and continuous improvement while your pricing still counts heads.

These are not rare. In Deloitte’s 2024 Global Outsourcing Survey of more than 500 executives, only a quarter reported lower vendor costs or better service quality, and 70 percent said their vendor management function is not fully mature. Seventy percent of organizations in the same survey had brought previously outsourced work back in-house within five years. The model is working somewhere. It is not working the way it was sold, and the people who bought it usually cannot say why.

You have not been idle. The escalations got a coordinator. The provider got a tighter service level. The station that pulled work back was allowed to keep it. The rollout got a change manager. The center got a retention bonus and a value dashboard. Each move improved something, and each one was a guess at a cause nobody had established, made because the symptom arrived with an obvious-looking fix attached. That is the pattern in the data, too. When ISG surveyed 368 executives responsible for outsourcing in 2024, 68 percent named cost as the top motivator, the average realized saving was 15 percent, and only 38 percent rated the savings as very good or excellent. Everyone measured the tasks. Nobody could see the system.

Here is the claim, and you are free to argue with it: the picture of what is actually going on in your operation has never been taken. Not the cause. Not the fix. The plain current state, laid against what the model says: where each piece of the work actually sits today, who actually owns it, whether it should have been split from the rest at all, and how the pieces are organized around the customer or the internal partner. Most operations have a version of that picture from the day the model was designed. Almost none have one from today.

That is good news because a picture can be taken quickly, and everything changes the moment it exists. A symptom with a fix attached feels like an answer. A picture of what is, held against what was supposed to be, produces something better: it tells you where to focus, and it makes the next move obvious rather than brave.

I have watched the picture surprise experienced leaders more than once. A forwarder with a one file, one owner standard written into its operating model and repeated in every onboarding discovers, when someone finally looks, that three stations practice it three different ways, not because anyone is careless but because nobody decided where that owner sits, what the owner keeps when the transactional work moves, or how the seat is resourced. The policy was real. The picture showed the practice. And the practice is what the customer had been experiencing all along.

In Orlando this March, the Interactive Discussion Group I co-led at SSOW Americas with Tina Robinson-Adamski of Domino’s, Governance as Optionality in the Age of AI, closed every table on one question: when was the last time your governance model enabled a strategic pivot rather than slowed one down? A framework nobody has retaken since the day the center opened can only govern the operation it was written for, and AI has already changed which work needs a human at all.

Where the work lives, who does it, and how it is organized is the bestshoring question. It is the layer above the location decision, not a synonym for it. Offshore, nearshore, onshore, captive, or provider are answers to one line in the picture, and in a well-run operation that line is filled in last. The Six Dimensions of Bestshoring Readiness™ are the frame the picture is taken in, and the frame is the same whether you commission the center or run it.

For the buyer, the savings the business case promised arrive in EBIT instead of stopping at gross profit, because the work that was supposed to move has actually moved and the work that was supposed to stay is owned by someone with the capacity to own it. The station stops pulling work back, because what the center returns is what the station needs. Every escalation lands with one named owner and the customer knows the name. The black hole has a door, and a person on the other side of it.

For the provider, the center is recognized and paid for the value it creates rather than the heads it counts, because the value is visible in the picture and the partners can see it too. Scope grows onto a model built to hold it instead of onto the model that happened to be there. The people who know the work stay, because the operation they work in makes sense. The best operators already live there: among the 20 most admired GBS organizations tracked by SSON Research and Analytics, the most common annual attrition band is 8 to 11 percent, in an industry where India’s BPO sector budgeted 9.7 percent salary increases for 2025 to hold on to people, according to WTW figures reported by Auxis.

I have watched this happen at scale. In an operation I worked on, shipment processing had already been centralized offshore and the cost line had already improved, and the leadership team was ready to fix the next symptom. Instead, someone took the picture. It showed transactional processing placed on purpose and everything else unplaced: ownership fragmented across the file, under-resourced in country, handovers not consistently governed, and a one file, one owner standard practiced differently at every desk. The design followed from the picture. Transactional processing stayed centralized. End-to-end file ownership and customer contact moved to a properly resourced nearshore team in Bogota, one owner per file. The customer relationship, commercial ownership, and the profit and loss stayed with the U.S. stations, which the Bogota team served.

In the U.S. pilot, customer response times improved 20 percent, KPI performance rose 70 percent, customer satisfaction climbed, labor savings exceeded 60 percent, and annual costs fell by $1.2 million, with breakeven inside the first year. The model was then deployed across the region, giving one point of control over service for the entire region, and later adopted globally. The full case study is here. None of that came from a better guess. It came from looking first.

The dashboard and the customer agree. The center and the business agree. And the next fix is the right one, because everyone can see what it is fixing.

The sequence matters, and most operations run it backwards. First, what is going on: the current picture. Then, where to focus, which the picture makes obvious. Then, why, the causes behind the gaps that matter. Then how, and only then, the fix. Skip the first step and every later one inherits the guess.

The first frame of the picture takes five minutes. The Bestshoring Readiness Health Check™ is for leaders who already run shared services, BPO, or distributed delivery. The Bestshoring Readiness Feasibility Checklist™ is for leaders weighing the first move. Both score you across the Six Dimensions, return the results on screen, and end with a complimentary Executive Strategy Session, after which you leave with an executive readout you can put in front of your board.

A picture built across the whole organization, with two to four completions and interviews, takes days rather than minutes and can cover the whole operation or start with a single product, function, or center. If you run the center rather than commission it, that is where your path begins. Either way, it starts with a conversation.

About the Author

Johnnie Moore is the Founder and CEO of The JR Moore Group. He spent 38 years in logistics and supply chain, 28 of them at DHL Global Forwarding, where he scaled the shared services for the Americas to 1,300 FTEs and developed global frameworks adopted across a network of nearly 6,000 employees worldwide. He defined Bestshoring as a strategic discipline and advises freight forwarders, 3PLs, 4PLs, and supply chain and logistics operators on where work should live, who should do it, and how it is organized.