Exploring Business Tranformation while Outsourcing

Outsourcing/offshoring a process quite often involves capturing for the very first time some or ANY formal documentation on business processes, especially with companies that have been running these processes for decades in the U.S or U.K. Detailed knowledge of these processes are often in the heads of experienced managers, business and operations folks.

The BPO service provider often provides a valuable artifact in documenting many business processes for the first time. They need to do it anyway for contractual, training and transitioning reasons.

Things don’t need to stop with just capturing the "as-is" picture of the business process and transitioning it to a company on-shore, your own shared services unit or offshore to an external third party service provider. Both BPO service buyers and providers may need to review this "as-is" picture and see if there are any business transformation efforts that can be done before transitioning it over. Anyway, BPO involves change, pain and a learning curve on the part of both the buyer and the service provider. Why not use this opportunity to effect some positive changes before transitioning it over?

This is where new and emerging technologies can effect quantum improvements in how things are done. Paper Invoices and paper orders may now be scanned, digitized and used for the first time in outsourcing/offshoring accounts payables and order entry and management business processes. This digitization process itself buys a number of efficiency and effectiveness improvements over the previous ways in which things are done.

www.soundbite.com (Disclaimer: I have no vested interest in this company. I was just excited at its potential for business transformation!) is an excellent example of how a new "automated messaging technology" can vastly improve the efficiency and effectiveness of voice-based processes like outbound telesales and outbound collections processes. The Soundbite technology takes in a list of people and phone numbers to be called and starts calling them. If a machine answers, it leaves an automated voice mail. If a person picks up the phone, it leaves a message if it is not the right person (by saying, "Press 1 if you are Person.X, otherwise Press 2..."). If it is the right person, then it connects the person to a live agent.

It may be annoying to the person being called, but look at it from the process point of view. Agents always start talking to the person only if it is the right person! Talk to voice agents and their managers. Their biggest frustration is making M calls to reach the right person N number of times. Quite often this percentage is quite low, as practitioners will tell you.

I heard from customers who are using this technology that agents really like this system since it increases their efficiency and effectiveness also (since they are always talking to the person only if they are available on the phone at that time). They do not waste time calling M people today to reach only N of them today (much smaller number). The list of unavailable people is added to the list tomorrow and it goes on. Now they do not have to worry about unavailable people. The system keeps trying until it gets the person for you on the phone. It increases the efficiency and effectiveness numbers by an order of magnitude.

Another lesson here is that quantum improvements in business processes don’t happen only when you pore over process flow diagrams or think Six Sigma or Lean techniques. Technology innovations can buy you significant increases in performance.

This is one way BPO service buyers can truly add value to outsourcing or offshoring. For that, it pays to keep tabs on new and emerging technologies that may provide quantum improvements in process efficiencies and effectiveness! Something to think about!

You can also check out the article that I wrote last year Ten Key Technologies for Lean Process Improvement.

Once a new technology rolls over you, if you’re not part of the steamroller, you’re part of the road. - Stewart Brand