Efficient and Effective BPO Management

Anna Engströmer Thought Leadership

October 29, 2020

Anna Engstromer shares an article on the management of external services, specifically, BPO transactions.

Consequences of poorly managed services are like chronic diseases: spreading its consequences little-at-a-time over vast areas – like customer service, availability, performance and speed of delivery – slowly building awareness for the problem but not considered as such until something breaks, or stops.

Temporal Focus

Much of any organization’s cost is external. How significant it is and how it breaks down by categories vary across sector and organization. Most organizations buy a significant volume of services through Business Process Outsourcing (BPO). The creation of such outsourcing usually gets proper resource allocation and management attention. The initial operating period typically gets it too, especially if much is at stake or if implementation success is part of managers objectives. 

But what about the continued management of external services? Typical BPO transactions have a life of several years. The process to source services is so complex it is a tempting option to extend services through renewal rather than to launch a new strategic sourcing process. Many BPO contracts go on being poorly managed, from the client side, for several years. Who notices this and raises the flag? Consequences of poorly managed services are like chronic diseases: spreading its consequences little-at-a-time over vast areas – like customer service, availability, performance and speed of delivery – slowly building awareness for the problem but not considered as such until something breaks, or stops. Since there is rarely one single cause for problems, the work to un-nestle third party contract management is hard. The people who do it are not always prepared for it, nor are they consistently understood and rewarded.

Key points in this article include:

• Elements of good contract management
• Vendor-led Conversation
• Contract fatigue

Read the full article, Why an A-Team to Do BPO Vendor Management, on Engstromer.com.

The Potential Cost Savings with  BPO and RPA

David Burnie Thought Leadership

December 9, 2019

If you want to know more about the potential benefits, scope, pros and cons of business process outsourcing (BPO) and robotic process automation integration (RPA), check out this article from the knowledge hub on David Burnie’s company website.

Both BPO and RPA aim to achieve the goal of streamlining processes, achieving efficiency and increased productivity, and yielding cost benefits.

BPO and RPA implementations allow organizations to perform back office, internal, and call centre tasks efficiently quickly. This provides enterprises the benefits of overhead cost reduction, improved productivity, better quality, and more.

Both RPA and BPO are most applicable for business processes that are:

1. Frequent – consistent daily/weekly volumes
2. Repetitive – e.g. data entry tasks
3. Rules-based – the process is defined by precise decision rules
4. Streamlined – stable, without redundant steps.

Read the full article, Business Process Outsourcing and RPA Integration, on the BPO & RPA knowledge hub at The Burnie Group website.