BPO SERVICES > Integrated Business Process Outsourcing

◊ Introduction

◊ Need for Integrated Business Process Outsourcing

◊ Integrated Business Process Outsourcing (iBPO) Solution

◊ iBPO @OptiSol

◊ AS – IS Process study

◊ Adapted Process

◊ Operational

 

Introduction

Companies worldwide have started realizing that reducing operating costs alone is not a major driver for Business Process Outsourcing. Client market place is looking for vendors who can provide complete business process outsourcing solution by providing ownership to the client’s

• Business applications
• Business process
• Business process infrastructure

This is largely due to the fact that in a BPO offshoring engagement, the term business process encompasses the above mentioned critical and integrated components that need to be line balanced in terms of removing any bottlenecks. It necessitates the BPO vendor to have capabilities that can manage these components and make the client responsible only for interfacing the process output with its other downstream business processes rather than focusing on the outsourced process(s).

This ability to manage the entire gamete of a business process from offshore is referred to as Integrated Business Process Outsourcing and this document covers on the need to have this approach and its relative merits in terms of strategic values.

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Need for Integrated Business Process Outsourcing

Industry witnessed different levels of outsourcing in the last two decades. It started with the IT outsourcing by the early 90s’ and BPO outsourcing in the late 90s’.It has resulted with the different components of a business process being outsourced to different vendors that results in increased

• Client coordination cost
• Process coordination overheads

The IT vendor provides application support to the process application and the BPO vendors supports the process transactions. Given this context, a reported production issue due a possible application bug / process infrastructure issue ( a production server crash) gets reported and resolved in the resolution path,

P1 ---> P2 ---> P3 - Issue Reporting

P4 ---> P5 ---> P6 - Issue Resolution

It gets raised at series of stages and gets resolved after a series of coordination on the issue at various places, including the client’s project management office and at the IT vendor’s project office. The problem becomes more severe if the issue gets reported during the offshore day time and the vendor has to wait till it comes to the notice of the client’s project management office. This set up would bring in lead time delays that has a direct impact on the Turn Around time requirements which are very critical and works on 12 / 16 / 24 hours basis for most of the BPO engagements. Also the associated vendors – both IT & BPO in the entire value chain need to understand that they work on different maturity levels with different Turn Around time requirements. Most of the time the TAT requirement for a IT maintenance projects does not go hand in hand with that of BPO projects resulting in production downtime to the BPO vendors. It demands an additional effort from the client and the vendors in terms of identifying and setting up a special task force and results in

• Increased process infrastructure management overheads
• Lead time delays - lead time losses in the resolution time for tickets that are raised during the night time of the client.
• Disparate vendor management overheads – vendors of different capabilities & maturities manage the components of the business process and the client need to set up different teams in house to manage.

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Integrated Business Process Outsourcing (iBPO) Solution

Integrated BPO makes it imperative for BPO vendors to realize that in a process outsourcing engagement, they touch the real time business process transactions and stay closer to the client’s business domain. It necessitates the vendors to understand the holistic picture of a business process including its upward and downstream process(s) and to define a transition framework that includes all the components of a business process,

• Process applications - vendor and the client work closely in setting up an offshore IT team to support production issues that may rise due to application bugs.
• Process transactions ramp up – Central focus of the engagement objective that focuses on ramping up the offshore team to deliver process transaction from offshore within the defined Turn – Around requirements and quality objectives
• Process Infrastructure – To manage and maintain critical production servers, server monitoring, Remote terminal services management etc

This integrated approach helps the client to realize outsourcing benefits at different phases of the engagement. As an outcome of this approach, the engagement relieves the client from all the process overheads in addition to the cost arbitrage on a sustainable long term basis and results in the consolidation of IT and BPO with minimum coordination overheads to yield the following strategic values,

• Competitive advantages – makes the client to go faster to the market with competitive SLAs’, as this model can utilize 16 – 24 hours utilization / day at offshore. For instance, a 16 hour shift utilization at offshore can result in 2 days process output in 1 business day of the client and so can offer products with better turnaround cycles.
• Reduces any incremental process spending – Process improvement ownership with the vendor and results cost avoidance to the client
• Location advantage – Cost containment

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iBPO @OptiSol

Our transition framework built on our tightly knit engagement model, migrates the business process to offshore in a 3 - phased manner,

• As – Is Process Study
• Adapted Process Study
• Operational State

Our approach is based on the rigid framework of six sigma with toll gates at each stages of transition to facilitate validation with all the key stake holders of the engagement. This is highlighted in the following figure,

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AS – IS PROCESS STUDY

The "As – Is" process study refers to the initial study of the process at its present state.

OptiSol approach the initial study with an offshore workshop presentation from our transition manager to the key stake holders at the client place. The workshop will be followed by an initial process study adhering to the framework of six sigma.

A detailed SIPOC framework is rigorously followed to capture the process. The process study will be done at various levels from a High level (L0) to an activity level without eliminating the process exceptions at Micro-level (L4).The depth of this study may vary from project to project or domain to domain based on the complexities involved.

The study will also understand the various parameters that will be critical to Quality and the existing Technology Environment. This will be but not limited to the

• Volume Trend and the Forecast
• Turn around time Requirements
• Quality Definitions

The outcome of the process study will be reviewed at the Toll gate 1 with the client's operations team.

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ADAPTED PROCESS

• At the end of the "As-Is" process study, our transition team will work closely with all the stake holders from the client side in defining the project plan right from the Communication Plan to the Offshore Hiring Plan.

• All the protocols pertaining to the project management will be defined and signed off with the client team.

• Also based on the initial process study, the Standard Operating Procedures for the process will be prepared, validated and signed off with the client team.

• At an execution level the offshore team will initiate the readiness of the IT infrastructure and the hiring process followed by the training. Since training will be a major process overhead for the client in doing the knowledge transition, we adopt a filter based approach for the training process. The training process is covered in 2 phases:

• L0 – Domain Training
• L1 – Process Training
• L2 – Process application / Process infrastructure training, work closely with the client to define the timeline of this training. Execute this training as part of this training phase or plans it for the next steady state operational stage.

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OPERATIONAL

In this phase we focus on Process Transformation in which the process will be thoroughly reviewed to drill down the Scope for Improvements. Also the Process Control Frameworks will be defined and implemented in this phase with continuous monitoring on the CTQ s' defined Process Steady State Management is the central focal point of this phase where we work on the Process Transformation to reduce any process related overheads to the client. In this phase we aim to Optimize, Reduce Cost and also innovatively to create competitive advantage through Process & Technology improvements. We set up a special IT task team as part of the program management team to take care of the process application and process IT infrastructure. The Six- Sigma approach and its DMAIC cycle are central to Process Improvements & Innovation.

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