**7. Conclusion**

Outsourcing has been one of the noticeable business practices in view of its demonstrated capability in accomplishing competitive advantage to the organization. With the developing fame of outsourcing in the manufacturing and service sectors, mining sector have also started capitalizing the conceivable outcomes of outsourcing. Outsourcing has now turned into a key device for mining industries for building up corporate capability through its viable and effective methods of value improvement. In view of this business prospect, the coal mining organization of India has started outsourcing its operational activities to meet the escalating demand of coal across the country. However, along with several success stories, there are quite a few pieces of evidence that portray several difficulties encountered by the organization. Accordingly, to accomplish any firm's business goals, it is prudent to consider it as a key aspect of corporate decision choices.

The present study provides a general introduction about outsourcing followed by its potential benefits and the shortcomings as witnessed in the existing literature. Besides giving an overview, the study provides a backdrop of the Indian outsourcing scenario considering the coal mining organization and outsourced activities by manufacturing and service industries in general. The study then discusses the significant contribution of the coal mining organization in reference to the growing importance of coal in the country. Subsequently, the relevance of outsourcing in view of the improved organizational performances for the Indian coal mining organization has been elucidated. Finally, the chapter ends with proposing an outsourcing decision model that may provide a comprehensive approach towards evaluating the appropriateness of such strategic decision as outsourcing in consistent with the organizational strategy for performance improvement for the coal mining organization in India.

The present study contributes in understanding a practical problem of a coal mining industry that may act as a guiding instrument to the mining managers in terms of decision making related to strategic sourcing. Developing an outsourcing decision support may assist the managers of the coal mining organization to determine the candidates for outsourcing, thus identifying the set of core activities that needs to be nurtured and protected for organizational excellence. The study provides elementary guidance to the management in investigating the appropriateness of outsourcing with the organizational performance through identification of key drivers. Further an effective outsourcing decision support tool may help managers to decide upon the optimal sourcing strategy among insourcing, outsourcing, and strategic alliance (partnership) for the organization's operational activities. While the Indian coal mining organization is reliant on third party service providers for identification and exploration of new coal reserves, investigation of relevant antecedents pertaining to trust, commitment, and long-term orientation may facilitate management as client firm to develop and improve outsourcing relationship with the service providers. Determining the impact of the aforementioned factors may also help the mining executives to formulate relevant policies accordingly. However, there are few limitations of the present study. First, the study deals with the

**33**

**Author details**

Mousumi Modak1

\*, Khanindra Pathak<sup>2</sup>

\*Address all correspondence to: mousumimodakiitr@gmail.com

© 2021 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,

1 Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, India

provided the original work is properly cited.

2 Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India

and Kunal Kanti Ghosh<sup>2</sup>

*Outsourcing: State-of-the-Art in India and an Insight to Coal Mining Industry*

development of an outsourcing decision-making framework broadly considering four aspects as presented. However, there are several possibilities to investigate an extensive set of decision elements within the said framework. Second, the outsourcing decision model proposed in the present study is based on the insights gained through the interaction with a particular expert group from the Indian coal mining organization, but to make it applicable for other industries, the framework may be altered/improved upon by incorporating changes as required. For a public sector like the Indian coal mining organization, it was difficult to obtain the various components of cost related to on-going outsourcing projects (particularly when many such projects are in either planning or finalization stage), the present study could not incorporate the influence of cost criteria and the required cost analysis for the proposed outsourcing decision framework. Hence, the current research work may be extended in future by incorporating several dimensions of cost. The study takes into account the client perspective, while it may be relevant to take into consideration the viewpoints of service providers to get a more comprehensive view.

*DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.96420*

#### *Outsourcing: State-of-the-Art in India and an Insight to Coal Mining Industry DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.96420*

development of an outsourcing decision-making framework broadly considering four aspects as presented. However, there are several possibilities to investigate an extensive set of decision elements within the said framework. Second, the outsourcing decision model proposed in the present study is based on the insights gained through the interaction with a particular expert group from the Indian coal mining organization, but to make it applicable for other industries, the framework may be altered/improved upon by incorporating changes as required. For a public sector like the Indian coal mining organization, it was difficult to obtain the various components of cost related to on-going outsourcing projects (particularly when many such projects are in either planning or finalization stage), the present study could not incorporate the influence of cost criteria and the required cost analysis for the proposed outsourcing decision framework. Hence, the current research work may be extended in future by incorporating several dimensions of cost. The study takes into account the client perspective, while it may be relevant to take into consideration the viewpoints of service providers to get a more comprehensive view.
