BPO Business and Delivery Models

When business executives come under pressure to improve corporate performance, they look less at growing revenues and more at cutting costs. To cut costs, management increasingly outsources certain business functions and processes to BPO services organizations. The philosophy behind BPO is simple: stick to your core competencies and leave everything else to low-cost third-party providers (or business process outsourcers).

BPO as strategy is not new. Some examples of BPO, such as GM and EDS, Xerox and EDS, Kodak and IBM, are more than a decade old. Over the years, the scale and scope of BPO has evolved considerably. It has also migrated from primarily Fortune 500 companies to large and midsized companies.

However, for many managers and decision-makers, the BPO opportunity is accompanied by rising bewilderment. To navigate through the uncharted topography of BPO, managers will need to answer three principal questions:

1. What is the right business model for my BPO strategy?
   
2. How can my organization create the right relationships?
   
3. What steps must my business take to ensure we meet our business objectives?

To help answer these questions, we have interviewed numerous executives responsible for BPO in many organizations, along with vendors that offer BPO services to others. We found that the relationship between the outsourcing organization and the outsourcing provider is a critical factor in realizing the expanding potential of BPO.

Featured Research:

		Creating a BPO Strategy: Why and Why Now?
		BPO Execution Framework: The Five Phases of a BPO Relationship
		Service Level Agreements
		Steps in Planning a BPO Strategy