Achieving Best-in-Class BPO - Secrets Unveiled

29 Feb 2012
by Eric Simonson, Rajesh Ranjan

Executive Summary

As Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) matures, companies and service providers must look for the next source of value – labor arbitrage is important, but not sufficient. In particular, the industry is seeking to create value propositions that achieve cost savings while also delivering other sources of value.

We conducted a survey to understand how organizations that are attaining greater value from BPO are different from normal BPO efforts. The survey statistically analyzed the differences in relationships across many dimensions, such as objectives, organization, metrics, service provider’s role, and others.

The results show a vivid difference in the approach and mindset of best-in-class BPOs relative to others. The differences cut across many areas and do not reveal a silver bullet. Two broad themes emerge:

  • Best-in-class BPOs do not view BPO as a small and isolated initiative (fire and forget), but rather as important and connected (involve and optimize)
  • Best-in-class BPOs are more successful in executing what is known to be important

The full survey results cover many dimensions and some of the most notable findings are that best-in-class BPO relationships:

  • Successfully implement more standardized processes
  • Productively resolve conflicts
  • Successfully execute change management plans
  • Proactively refine objectives as the BPO relationship matures
  • Consider the service provider to be a strategic partner
  • Include business benefits beyond cost savings in the business case
  • Identify ways to use data and information from services to capture additional benefits
  • Leverage business users receiving services in setting the direction of the BPO relationship

This summary report covers the following topics:

  • Introduction
  • Summary of findings
  • Implications for BPO relationships
  • About the survey
 

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