BPO Management Solution: How and Why

As I have mentioned several times, the most common mistake that businesses make is outsourcing tasks that are not clearly defined and do not have clear financial and business objectives.

The process of clearly defining the objectives of your need will make the process of finding and selecting your BPO provider much easier.

Here are the factors that you want to be able to answer about any provider:

Domain Expertise – Do they have the deep subject-matter expertise for your specific project?

Process Improvement – Do they have a record of continuous improvement and reengineering? In other words, can they adapt to changing circumstances and can they keep you up-to-date?

Remember, your provider is operating in their core competencies not yours. You need to trust their ability to keep up with global changes and make specific recommendation

Savings and productivity Savings and productivity improvement is many companies primary goal. So why is it third on my list?

Do the math. Without domain expertise, and an evolving BPO provider, your savings and productivity gains will be transitory. A long-term and profitable BPO solution needs sustainable innovation. Your company should be able to provide you with functional operating metrics, detailed service-level agreements and governance policies to move the process along.

Technology Large BPO companies often have proprietary commercial applications and a variety of partners (big players like Cisco and Oracle or regional providers in their own countries).

That's great if you working for a large company with many plants and division and employees all over the world. But overall, you simply need to make sure that your offshore outsourcers have current technology and the financial means to secure new technology as needed.

How do you ascertain this? A point-blank questions will do the trick? Perhaps your industry has word of a new technological innovation or trend coming down the pipeline. Ask your potential provider about it:

The whizbang device may be released in 9 months. How do you think this will effect our industry and what are your plans when it comes out?

Scale As mentioned in our conversatons about call center and telemarketing solutions - how scalable and flexible can your provider be?

Are they will to do a small test project (or several) to get the ball rolling? Can a succesfull project quickly be multiplied, so that you could doube, triple or even quadruple the number of people working on your project?

If you are dealing with cutting-edge process, you do not want to have to hire and train and entirely new outsourcing company everytime you score a homerun.