Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) = Global
Fusion

by Parveen Panwar

Published on this site: April 5th, 2006 - See more articles from this month

'Globalism' Sweeps the World

Increasingly the world of business is coming together to tackles people/business & political issues. This increased focus on collaborative synergies is reshaping corporate strategies and even transforming competition.as even competitors at times come together to collectively grow the markets/lobby for concessions from governments or form business interest groups. All this is the new face of globalisation - called 'globalism'.

Just like fusion releases limitless energy, business fusion through the spread of globalism is releasing unlimited opportunities for growth today and tomorrow. Outsourcing is one of the trends of this globalism as business come together on a shared expertise basis for jointly adding lasting value to their mutual bottom-lines. Outsourcing has also given rise to many new ways of collaborating - like the rise of collaborative marketplaces/portals on the web where outsourcing people eonverge/meet viz. service providers, service seekers, corporate, thought leaders, CEOs, CFOs, Project Managers, Transition Experts, freelancers, consultants, service seekers, BPO analysts/experts/advisors.

BPO & Global Fusion

Today's consultative BPOs are a unique example of 'global fusion' where different cultures and processes 'fuse' to release an enormous energy viz. worker enthusiasm and significantly higher revenues too. Many BPO employ expatriate multicultural staff from different countries to deliver integrated BPO i.e. both the contact center as well the IT needs of its global clients. This leads to immense gains to both service providers as well their workforce as people from different cultures enjoy working together towards the same business goal and there are immense cross learnings for everyone in terms of process innovations and cultural bonding.

The other fusion is at the outsourced business process level as it seamlessly integrates with client process & global operations. This is a process of continuous improvement as the outsourcing vendor is continuously re-inventing its operational procedures by introducing innovative processes that significantly enhance revenues of its clients while saving millions too. Being domain focused enables outsourcing project managers to offer consulting to its clients (as it is able to view the clients' customer needs more objectively/closely) that help them align their competitive strategies more effectively.

BPO vendors are then able to charge their its clients on the value they delivers rather than the usual model of effort based costing. This way the clients do not have to pay for any service/personnel in-efficiencies (as is the case with the usual effort based pricing practiced by other BPOs, where the costing depends on the number of seats/people allocated to a process).Thus client engagements at BPOs consistently grow up the value chain and this business fusion is a great win for clients, great for employees, great for outsourcing service providers and even greater for India as a trailblazing destination for BPO innovations!

Global Transformations

Companies who outsource are those who experience higher pressure to provide global integration. According to a recent report, rising majority of companies currently use outsourcing as a transformational vehicle. A key feature of adopting business process transformation through a BPO model is that the process improvement stages can often be funded by the savings released in the initial outsource , particularly if this involves labour cost savings via a low-cost off shoring location.

The outsourcing initiative is now seen to be more strategic. The business reasons for outsourcing appear persuasive, and the experience to date revolutionary to say the least. Apart from technology optimization, the other outsourcing -improvement levers are: outsourcing economies of scale, labour arbitrage, people-skills optimization and continuous process improvement.

BPO providers with core skills in technology and systems integration take the risk out of implementing automation, and their investment in IT infrastructure is an inherent benefit of BPO. Both CEOs and CFOs are looking for ways to drive benefits beyond cost issues to transform overall corporate performance, competitiveness and shareholder value. For them, BPO is a fact of good business life. It continues to grow and make its mark as a prime mover in cutting costs and generating efficiency.

Parveen Panwar is founder of Go4outsourcing.com. http://www.go4outsourcing.com is an online freelance marketplace to connect service buyers with freelancers/service firms. Freelance web developer, freelance
programmers.