Consultative Business Process Outsourcing (BPO)

Outsourcing = Global Momentum

The global business landscape has changed dramatically in the last couple of years thanks to growth of outsourcing. Outsourcing has gained strength as a management strategy for sustaining global growth as well competitive advantage to overcome the challenges of ever growing business complexities. So whether it’s a Fortune 100 transnationals or even a small enterprise, everyone is looking at outsourcing as a key growth engine thanks to the increased levels of process specialization and sophistication. Domain specialization and not just economies of scale are key to the success of any outsourcing relationship. Outsourcing has been recognized to save companies and not just costs.

Evolving Outsourcing Relationships

Organisations now regard outsourcing as a key initiative for overall growth and not just as mere cost saving exercise. Hence organizations are increasingly seeking best-in-class outsourcing specialists and not just large best of breed outsourcing service providers. This is especially true in the IT & engineering verticals as organizations even outsource new product development tasks to specialized offshore vendors. Research intensive, customer focused outsourcing relationships now have to include the following to remain competitive:

• Innovation Update. Quarterly, bi-annual, or annual innovation reviews (also known as innovation boards) focus typically on state of the market, industry trends and relevant information, technology updates, solution demonstrations, site visits, etc. Leverage other industry peer groups to understand what is happening in your industry, the outsourcing industry, and other sectors.

• Benchmarking. Clients should always activate their benchmarking clauses and focus on best practice as comparators of innovation—not just cost comparisons. Benchmark both functional excellence and outsourced environments.

• Stakeholder Satisfaction Surveys. Perform monthly, quarterly, and annual customer satisfaction surveys. They should be “360 degrees”—covering multiple dimensions and all internal and external stakeholders.

• Deliver on Partnering Promise. Hold regular collaborative planning sessions. Where people are briefed on the strategic and business objectives. Service providers need to come up with implantable strategies on how best they can meet their clients’ business challenges. This makes the outsourcing vendors to think and act above simple tactical delivery.

• Value sharing framework. A transparent value-from-outsourcing sharing mechanism on a case-by-case basis should be harnessed to pay for business services delivered. Inclusion of regular mutual rewards for both your organization and that of the service provider boosts people motivation at all levels.

• Service Excellence. All SLAs must be tied to process excellence or customer delight will not happen. Project milestones, “go-live” events, and pilots are tangible means of tracking process maturity & excellence. Other measures include customer satisfaction, productivity, Six Sigma (defects), work elimination, etc.

• Outsourcing Management. The internal governance team should have a transformation or innovation owner, sufficient staff & budget to help drive innovation and must hold the provider accountable for innovation. Reassure and demonstrate to the provider that the relationship is long-term; otherwise they will be inclined to disinvest in innovation and the relationship. Your organization must retain process management expertise at a level at which you can clearly articulate future state requirements, evaluate proposals brought forward by the service provider, and work with your organization to get the business case for change.

• Executive Visibility / Support. Senior executives from the service provider side must have high visibility and access. This includes steering committees, reciprocal headquarter visits, joint speaking engagements, regularly scheduled calls, quarterly and annual briefings.

• Behaviour/Communication/Culture. Be prepared to invest in and encourage business process transformations that are aligned to business goals - rather early in any outsourcing relationship. Transformation requires a partnership mindset, not a transactional orientation. Innovation is often not brought to bear because clients do not ask for it, define what they mean by it, and motivate the provider to deliver it, or put restrictions around it. Clients rarely help the provider to understand what is important to them.

Consultative BPO

Outsourcing has now scaled the maturity milestone globally and hence is increasingly consultative in nature rather than being mere business vendors. Outsourcing relationships now proactively meet business challenges as specialist BPO vendors invest to stay ahead of the learning curve.

Outsourcing is often regarded as a change catalyst and hence clients are increasing using outsourcing initiatives in their growth strategies/ employee career planning initiatives. Joint client-service provider partnering is key to this new consultative approach where both invest in transformations and not just fund reactive process management.

Business Process Outsourcing: The Perfect Solution for Your Business

The business process involves a lot of things. It will involve every aspect of your company in order to let your company operate smoothly and efficiently. It will involve business tasks, such as marketing, payrolls, help desks, management, human resources and more.

In the past, handling all these can be easy. But because of the growing demands in businesses today, you have to consider that it will be difficult for your company to cope up with today’s competitiveness in the business world. Your company should maximize its resources in order to remain competitive with other companies.

This would be impossible or very expensive if you handle every business process involved. This is why many companies are now considering outsourcing their business process.

Business process outsourcing is one of the most popular and the most cost-efficient business solution that you can ever make. By contracting other companies to do a specific business task, you will be taking off extra work involved in your company and focus more on important aspects in running your business.

For example, making payrolls can be time consuming. It will involve computation of salaries of every employees and it will also involve taxes. You can hire your own employees to do the payroll for you. But, this will only add to the expenses that your company is making. Your target would be to decrease overall expense in your company. So, in order to save money, you have to outsource this particular business process to companies that accepts outsourcing.

Another example would be the help desk. Every company that manufactures products needs one. This particular business process is a way to communicate with your clients and know about their feedback in your products and it is also a way to assist your clients in case they encounter difficulty with your product. Creating a help desk department may prove to be too costly. It will involve everything from hiring additional employees and purchasing all the necessary tools you need to create an efficient and working help desk.

Today, there are available call center companies that will be able to provide a help desk for you. They will be the one who will answer your calls and generate reports regarding each caller and providing the reports for your company.

Companies regularly outsource their business process offshore, particularly to developing countries filled with qualified and talented individuals, such as China, Philippines, Mexico and India. These countries offer good quality services for your business process and they charge a very cheap rate for these services.

By outsourcing your company’s business process or some of your company’s business process, your company will be able to utilize its facilities to its maximum potential.

Through business process outsourcing you will be able to cut some operational costs and at the same time, let your company focus more on important factors in running your own business.

These are the reasons why you should consider outsourcing your business process to offshore companies.

Always keep in mind that you should first check the quality of an offshore outsourcing company first before you sign the contract in order to be sure that you will be getting your money’s worth. Remember this and it will pave the way to make your company the best in the industry.

Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) = Global Fusion

‘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.

Accounting Outsourcing Service to augment your business prospects

Are you unable to keep a tab on the heavy accounting work undertaken by your accounting firm? This is just no reason for anyone to despair about his/her business prospects. Opt for accounting outsourcing service from an outsourcing firm to meet hectic customer demands. Accounting is a seasonal business, which witnesses heavy demand from customers to get their tax returns prepared and pay their taxes timely. This is the time when accounting outsourcing service comes as a boon to accounting firms and CPAs.

Several outsourcing companies deal with accounting and provide their clients with accounting outsourcing services. If you are eager about earning revenue through your accounting business, outsourcing the process is the best source for you. Accounting outsourcing services are offered considering the urgent requirements of CPAs and accounting firms to meet customer demand during the tax season in the US.

To run your accounting business successfully, you will have to choose a good outsourcing company which meets all your requirements. Take a few minutes out of your busy schedule to scout the best accounting outsourcing service provider to work for you. The World Wide Web is the best source for information regarding bookkeeping outsourcing service.

While researching for a good outsourcing company, it is very essential to check out the different features provided by the company. See the different types of security features which are put in place for protecting customer’s financial security and personal identity by the accounting outsourcing company. In this age of advanced communication, it has become all the more important then ever to maintain strict secrecy about customer’s finical details and personal identification. Customer security must be of major concern for any outsourcing company.

Compare the cost offered by different companies for doing accounting outsourcing work. Opt for the firm which provides you good quality service at an affordable price. Sometimes however compromising on the price for the service offered to you can actually spell loss for a business. This is to say that always the highest price does not guarantee the best services and vice versa. So you must undertake careful considerations before you actually choose a company for doing the outsourcing work for your firm.

You can get many benefits and enjoy peace of mind by outsourcing your accounting work to an outsourcing firm. Accounting outsourcing service work is done by trained professionals in the developing countries. This means the cost of labor is low compared to other places. Professionals in developing countries are highly qualified, but lack job openings. So by accounting outsourcing your customers can get their work done by highly qualified professionals, without spending an extra cent.

Another benefit of accounting outsourcing service is that if you are at anytime not satisfied with the work done, you can fire the accountant and hire new ones for doing the job. With plenty of opportunities available, you will not find any dearth of talent and manpower in this field. There are plenty of opportunities open for you to explore on the internet.

Accounting outsourcing service spells instant success for a business. The simple reason for this is the reduced cost of the services provided. By accounting outsourcing service the entire method of accounting is made cost effective and simple for CPAs and accounting firms to handle.

Building Business Success Through Outsourcing

Outsourcing is no stranger to controversy. Ever since Russell Kelly Office Services paved the way for onshore outsourcing in 1946, onshore and offshore outsourcing have had their fair share of critics. It used to be an issue of exploitation of cheap labor for personal business gains. Then companies themselves became disgruntled with the outsourcing model because of their unrealistic expectations of cost savings and ROI which failed to meet any of their expectations.

Problems with vendors and poor communication channels were also just some of the hurdles companies and suppliers had to deal with. But given all the cynicism, outsourcing has continued to gain in momentum, proving to skeptics that with a comprehensive strategy in place, outsourcing is a real force to be reckoned with for sheer business proficiency.

Medical device companies are a prime example of how outsourcing almost every phase of their product development to the right contract manufacturer, can give them the edge in a very highly competitive sector. It is this almost perfect marriage of specialized knowledge and expertise shared between an OEM and the contract manufacturer that determines the outcome of an outsourcing venture.

It used to be the case when OEMs had to resort to using a number of outsourcing companies to accomplish specific tasks to produce a single product. There was one company for the design process, another for the manufacturing process and another for marketing the end product. It is here that outsourcing perhaps, exposes its weakest link due to the law of diminishing returns, where productivity is affected when too many people get involved.

It’s for this reason that today, a growing number of contract manufacturers have made it their priority to set themselves apart from the competition and provide an all round solution for OEMs. Meaning, these contract manufacturers don’t just turn OEMs’ visions into prototypes and shut its door when the pilot is completed. Their outsourcing services now extend to customized solutions for each OEM client; regulatory assistance; supply chain management and after-market support.

Not only will OEMs reduce costs by using a contract manufacturer that caters to every operations function, but OEMs will now also be able to speed up production of quality breakthrough products to stoke up higher sales. This is such an understated advantage, which bears repeating. Working with a contract manufacturer that performs all the heavy lifting for an OEM, like managing the entire supply chain for instance, is a huge burden lifted off for an OEM.

This value proposition of cost-saving, profit-boosting and value-added services has been the win-win situation that outsourcing has been preaching all along. Outsourcing was never about producing low-cost products just for the sake of efficiency, not especially in an innovative market such as the medical device sector.

A contract manufacturer delivering full service outsourcing also benefits by understanding more about its client’s technology, expanding its knowledge base which ultimately, can only bode well for the end user. If innovation is to continue to flourish, then full-service contract manufacturers must adopt a keen interest in learning about the OEM’s market it is serving.

Outsourcing done correctly will carry an OEM and a contract manufacturer into a strategic partnership that can reap benefits for years to come. It is evident then that thoughtful contract manufacturer selection is essential, if business goals of an OEM are to be met. And it all starts with a multidisciplinary contract manufacturer skilled in innovative product designs, engineering expertise and project management skills - all components that determine the success, or failure of a medical device company.

Business Process Outsourcing in Action

Business process is the skeleton of a certain business activity. It involves the description of different tasks and possible outcomes that are associated with a specific business activity. It is essential in crafting the business goals of a certain corporate organization, which is clearly defined in the organization’s business strategy.

Business process is classified into three categories, which are as follows:

• The management processes, which is followed to run the operation of the business and comply with all existing yet relevant requirements.

• The operational processes, which is followed in delivering the business value to clients, and is considered as an integral part of a corporate organization’s core business.

• The supporting processes, which is followed to support the core-based processes. It includes accounting, information technology (IT) support, and recruitment processes.

Being the skeleton of your organization’s business activity, you must give utmost importance to your business process as a whole. This is extremely important since the success or failure in achieving the goals of your business will largely depend on the process that you have followed, together with your business strategies and plans. Thus, without an effective business process, your business is as good as dead when the time comes.

Realizing the importance of a business process in achieving their business objectives, there are companies that prefer to outsource some or all of their business process (most specifically the non-core processes) to third-party organizations. The main motive in outsourcing a business process is to allow the business to invest most of their time, financial, and human resources into core activities and focus on building effective strategies, which will fuel the growth of the company.

Since the global marketplace is fast-changing and highly-competitive, your business must concentrate on improving the productivity and at the same time trim down unnecessary costs. Non-core business processes are being outsourced since the tasks involved in these processes consumes time, essential resources, and energy. Thus, outsourcing these non-core business processes will help you achieve a cost-efficient system.

Non-core business processes that can be outsourced range from production to customer service to support functions (such as software development). Most companies that are outsourcing their business process are from Western countries and they are delegating the work to outsourcing firms located offshore, especially countries located on the Eastern hemisphere, such as China, Philippines, India, and Malaysia.

While more and more companies are becoming comfortable with outsourcing their business processes, outsourcing most of their learning and development functions is still a new approach to many learning professionals. Moving the training and learning model that is completely in-house to one that will be handled by other individuals outside the business is a big leap. However, as mentioned earlier, it is important that these processes receive equal importance and consideration for the benefit of your business as a whole. Thus, despite of business process outsourcing as a new approach, many training and learning professionals are starting to get the grip of the new system and subsequently will follow the outsourcing trend.

Business process, especially the non-core one, needs to be given equal importance and attention to achieve an efficient business operation. Outsourcing these business processes will not be a waste of time and financial resources, but rather a strategy to be followed. Surviving in this highly-competitive global marketplace is not as easy as you think. You need an option that will work to your advantage — and that is outsourcing.

Business Process Outsourcing: A Cheap Alternative to Get the Job Done

Try to imagine that you need a business process to be finished. You hire a professional in your country that charges about a hundred dollars to get the job done. This can prove to be too expensive for your company. What if you can get the job done, with the same quality made by a person with the same qualifications as the person you hired before, to do the particular business process at half the price?

This can prove to be very attractive. However, how can you be able to find this person with the same qualification but charges half the price your professional charges? The answer to this question is to outsource your business process in developing countries full of talented professionals.

Since developing countries have lower minimum salary rates, outsourcing can prove to be a cheaper alternative to do a particular business process that you need. Not only that, if your company is burdened with heavy workloads, outsourcing can help your company ease the burden. This will mean more efficiency and productivity for your company while saving a lot of money in the process.

By outsourcing your business process, you can be sure that you will be able to get the job done at half the price. Developing countries, such as India, China, Philippines, and others can provide cheap labor compared to hiring professionals in the United States.

Outsourcing companies is considered as a major industry in developing countries. Governments of developing countries are welcoming outsourcing companies to provide top quality jobs for their professionals with high paying salary. Although the salary you will give to outsourcing companies in other countries may be considered high, in the United States it will be considered to be very low, the minimum wage in developing countries is far lower than you can imagine.

Outsourcing business processes in other countries will also mean saving a lot of money on company insurance, social security payments and other benefits that you will be required to pay for if you hire a regular employee in your company to do the job.

As you can see, outsourcing your business process' main advantage is providing your company with cheap labor and at the same time quality and professionally done jobs. The bottom line for outsourcing is saving a lot of money for your company.

So, if you are looking for a way to get cheap labor for your company, you can consider looking outside your country for outsourcing companies that can tailor your needs for your company.

However, before hiring a particular outsourcing company, you have to make sure that the quality of their work meets your company’s standards. Outsourcing companies are now providing ways for you to evaluate their work first before you hire them. Because of this, you can be sure that you will be getting the best outsourcing company to get your business process done.

Outsourcing doesn’t only provide cheap labor for your company, but it can also ease the burden of heavy workload because of the growing demand for your company’s services. Through outsourcing, you will be able to increase productivity and efficiency of your company.

However, you should always remember that outsourcing is not for everybody. You have to determine if your company should outsource your business process or not. If you think your company can handle it, you should keep the work in your company. But if it proves to be very burdensome, you should consider outsourcing. So, instead of hiring additional regular employees in your company, you can outsource your business process and save a lot of money.