Making The Right BPO Choices

1
Making The Right BPO Choices
Christine Ferrusi Ross Forrester Research
2
Definition of business process outsourcing (BPO)
The delegation of one or more business processes
(like accounts payable, customer service, or
claims processing) to an external provider that
owns and manages the selected processes
3
Please describe your companys interest in BPO
4
Why are you using or considering BPO?
5
What are the challenges in doing BPO?
6
Many providers offer only a few of the BPO key
skills

• Deep process understanding
• To understand the workflow, inputs and outputs
• Consulting expertise
• For reengineering and change management
• Broad technical skills
• To operate and upgrade systems and apps
• Operational experience
• To run and fine tune the process
• Financial investments
• To take over assets and support 5-10 year contract

7
And different skills are needed depending on the
process type
8
Forresters view of BPO

• BPO is a fragmented market that incorporates
  dozens of horizontal and industry-specific
  processes, as well as hundreds of subprocesses
• Current BPO practices are suboptimal they often
  focus on labor arbitrage with minimal process
  change or one-time reengineering that gets
  maintained
• Firms should consider how the outsourcer can help
  improve the processes it does not outsource

9
Intertwined BPO will bring the most advantage

• Intertwined BPO is using an outsourced process to
  improve an internally-run process (ie, using
  outsourced accounts payable to help internal
  staff improve their financial forecasting and
  budgeting processes)

10
Intertwined BPO requires changing the
relationship over time
11
Thank you
Christine Ferrusi Ross 1 617/613-6124 cross_at_forre
ster.com www.forrester.com