Process Improvement Opportunities for BPO Service Providers

BPO Service Providers, usually may not get an entire end-to-end business processes to be executed. They get bits and pieces of the business process, especially those steps that are manual, that they need to execute at their premises, in the same country or offshore.

In Insurance Polciy Underwritiing or Health Care Claims settlement, the manual work may be outsourced in bits and pieces but there could be significant parts of the process that may be automated with rules engines or those that require Actuarial Judgement or Healthcare knowledge.

This kind of splintering of business processes is more than the norm than exceptions. Most of the large insurance companies in the U.S outsource many parts of the Underwriting or Claims Processing processes, a lot to other third-party service providers in the U.S itself and some may go offshore.

Process Improvement then becomes a challenge of improving the whole process vs pieces of the process. It can still be done well if driven by the BPO service buyer primarily. They have visibility to the entire process, those that are done at the home company, as well as those that are outsourced to the service provider/

By clearly idenitifying , Input KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), Process KPIs and Output KPIs for each large piece of the process that is at home and for those pieces of the process that are outsourced, you can still keep an eye on how the process was before any improvement effort and after the improvement effort.

The other key advantage in outsourcing pieces of the process is that in many companies this starts the process of documenting parts or in some cases the whole process in some earnest for the first time. This invariably helps in process improvement since you have, for the first time, some accirate documentation of the whole process.

When you can’t change the direction of your wind -- adjust your sails - Anonymous