Diploma Thesis from the year 2006 in the subject Business economics - Operations Research, grade: 1,4, Stralsund University of Applied Sciences, 48 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Due to the fact of increasing globalization, mergers & acquisitions, cost pressure and growing expectations of the customers regarding price and quality, companies have to reconsider their strategy and organizational structure. If companies are not able to stand the challenge and can't fulfill the expectations they will loose customers and consequently market share. To remain competitive they have to shorten the development time for products and optimize methods, structures and organizations in regard to cut the costs. To face these challenges appropriate solutions are needed. One possibility to achieve this is outsourcing. The special type IT-outsourcing (ITO) is already accomplished by many companies but more and more companies are taking into account the possibility of business process outsourcing (BPO). BPO is very critical and has to be considered carefully. Companies give away their in-house functions to external service provider. This comprises a dependency and requires a high degree of trust. Once the decision is made it is hard and cost intensive to reverse it. Finding an appropriate business model for example shared service centers, joint ventures or outsourcing to an external provider and identifying adequate onshore, nearshore or offshore locations requi...