BPO services have traditionally been limited to functional activities such as finance, accounting, and customer service, primarily focused on cost savings and efficiency through labour arbitrage. While these activities are essential, enterprise leaders now recognize the need to expand BPO services to include end-to-end processes and enterprise-wide data flows.
- When companies outsource functional activities, they create siloed processes disconnected from the rest of the organization, which increase operational inefficiencies. Organizing BPO services around end-to-end processes enables companies to streamline and integrate their business processes, optimize efficiency, ensure their data is organized and accessible, enable more efficient decision making, and drive better business outcomes. For an instance, outsourcing HR may lead to mismatched employee skills and company needs due to lack of control. Integrating HR with strategic planning enables collaboration and alignment of recruitment strategies with overall company goals. Similarly integrating the finance and accounting function with the company’s budgeting and forecasting processes can enable the finance team to provide accurate and up-to-date data to other departments, enabling better strategic planning and resource allocation.
- Organizing BPO services around enterprise-wide data flows is certainly a step in the right direction. However, it’s important to note that this approach may not solve underlying issues that could perpetuate a messy data landscape. Without addressing these underlying issues through process reengineering, outsourcing could simply result in the same problems being outsourced at a lower cost. So it is crucial to understand importance of addressing underlying issues alongside aligning with enterprise data flows.
The Bottom Line: The scope of BPO services is expanding beyond functional activities to encompass end-to-end processes and enterprise-wide data flows.
This shift is driven by the need for more streamlined and integrated business processes and the increasing importance of data in the current business landscape. Organizing BPO services in this way can lead to streamlined and integrated business processes, optimized efficiency, organized and accessible data, efficient decision making, and better business outcomes.
Explore the HFS Pulse Dashboard
Take a look at the breadth of data in our Pulse Dashboard, which showcases data about current and future demand trends for technology and business services and related emerging technologies. See more here.
