One of the long touted benefits of outsourcing was relief from the minutia involved in manufacturing, billing, service and more. As outsourcing took off, few worried about the loss of visibility into those functions because they weren't considered core competencies anyway. The prevailing logic was companies should focus on processes that made them unique and everything else should be off loaded to companies that excelled in each domain. In the supply chain, that meant long chains of components from various companies feeding into more complex components that were shipped to the top of the chain and assembled into the finished product.