Organisations considering offshore business processing
outsourcing (BPO) may discover that it is more appropriate to open
their own service operation abroad than to hire an external
provider.That is the latest advice from analyst group
Gartner, which warned businesses not to jump on the offshore BPO
bandwagon without making a detailed assessment of their goals and
needs.
Businesses may decide to use a hybrid
strategy, farming out some business processes externally while
moving others to overseas operations of its own, Gartner said.
Outsourcing business processes and some IT
development to providers in countries with lower labour costs is a
growing trend. India, in particular, is an increasingly favoured
BPO site for UK and US-based companies.
Gartner cautions companies not to get swept
away by the BPO offshore outsourcing hype and instead consider key
questions when seeking an external provider:
What does the company expect to
accomplish from the outsourcing? The decision whether to
use an external provider could vary depending on whether the
company is looking to lower costs, improve services or focus on its
core business, for example.
What is the nature of the business
process that might get outsourced? Good fits for offshore
BPO include processes that are repetitive and
transaction-intensive, while it might not be the best idea to
outsource abroad processes involving sensitive or confidential data
that must be kept secure.
How efficiently is the company
carrying out the business process in question today?
Companies that measure this may find that if they are particularly
efficient at performing this function, it might end up costing them
more if they outsource it to an offshore provider that will not be
able to match its productivity. The reverse could also be true, in
which case offshore BPO would make sense.
Juan Carlos Perez writes for IDG News Service