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Business process outsourcing (BPO)
is the practice of using a third party, contracted to perform specific,
specialized processes on a company’s behalf. Although “outsourcing” in
its most basic form has been used for decades, such as when a business
uses an outside accountant to balance the books, it has become a
practice used by the majority of businesses and large companies, on a
much larger scale. By outsourcing certain aspects of “doing business,”
the company can focus on its primary purpose, whatever that may be.
BPO is distinct from information technology (IT) outsourcing, which
focuses on hiring a third-party company or service provider to do
IT-related activities, such as application management and application
development, data center operations, or testing and quality assurance.
There are two primary types of
BPO : Back office and Front
office outsourcing. Typical back office processes that may be
outsourced include payroll, billing, logistics and human resources. Some
companies offer their services in collections, credit analysis and job
recruitment. More than ever, processes that one would never think would
be outsourced, such as claims processing at an insurance company, are
being outsourced to separate companies. Examples of front office
outsourcing include technical support, customer service, marketing and
advertising.
Now it is common for organizations to outsource financial and
administration (F&A) processes, human resources (HR) functions, call
center and customer service activities and accounting and payroll.
Many of these BPO efforts involve offshoring -- hiring a company based
in another country -- to do the work. India is a popular location for
BPO activities.
An offshoot of BPO is KPO -- knowledge process outsourcing. Considered
by some to be a subset of BPO, KPO includes those activities that
require greater skill, knowledge, education and expertise to handle. For
example, whereas an insurance company might outsource data entry of its
claims forms as part of a BPO initiative, it may also choose to use a
KPO service provider to evaluate new insurance applications based on a
set of criteria or business rules; this work would require the efforts
of a more knowledgeable set of workers than the data entry would. The
current definition of KPO encompasses R&D, product development and legal
e-discovery, as well as a number of other business functions.
Also coming into use is the term BTO -- business transformation
outsourcing. This refers to the idea of having service providers
contribute to the effort of transforming a business into a leaner, more
dynamic, agile and flexible operation
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