You are here Industries » BPO Companies

BPO Companies

General Trends

Globalization and increasingly intense competition have forced companies to focus on their core competencies. Business functions are outsourced but still remain an integral part of the way firms serve their end customers. This trend has accelerated during the last 20 years. It will continue to accelerate at an even faster pace in the future. And this has momentous consequences for business process outsourcing (BPO) companies.

BPO companies’ ability to function seamlessly with their customer organizations is a key success factor that will lead to agility, efficiency, and long-term relationships. Pressure for increased efficiency and transparency will increase with intensified global competition.

The first wave of outsourcing saw labor-intensive administrative tasks outsourced to low-cost countries. In the second wave of outsourcing, function-based business transactions will be outsourced. These transactions will be measured in real time against service level agreements, and fulfillment of these agreements will determine the charges that can be made and market share retained. To compete in this fierce marketplace, providing low-cost labor will not suffice.

eBuilder’s Cloud Processes for the value network open new opportunities for BPOs to create efficiency and measurable business value by leveraging our automated end-to-end Cloud Processes. They provide the relevant supervision and deviation-handling services to ensure optimal usage of a customer’s assets and other’s assets throughout the network of collaborating business partners, the value network. Our Cloud Processes guarantee full compliance with the customer’s business processes and enable a BPO company to handle multiple customers in a generic and cost effective way.

eBuilder’s Cloud Processes open a multitude of areas for outsourced services in shared service centers for travel management, order fulfillment, after sales optimization, transport management, procurement, etc.

eBuilder’s Cloud Processes offer the following business improvements:


Business Improvements

Reduced Operating Costs

eBuilder's Cloud Processes automate more than 50% of the manual administration in handling business transactions. This opens up for increased profitability and improved service levels for BPO companies.


Reduced Costs for Sourcing

eBuilder’s Cloud Processes enable you to leverage eBuilder’s platform, hosting infrastructure, and highly cost-effective implementation and operation for faster go to market. Existing integrations and best practice processes are up and running within weeks from order, and the upfront investment is reduced to a minimum.

Improved Customer Satisfaction/Retention

Customer experience is significantly enhanced by the customer’s access to an online automated service that displays real-time information and statistics from the business processing relevant to the customer’s concern. And the value-added services and assets provided by the BPO company will give the customer both full transparency throughout the end-to-end process and all the relevant statistics to be able to follow up and improve the BPO service.

Enhanced Corporate Dexterity

The ability to handle dynamic complexity will have a vital impact on your competitiveness, profitability, ability to create an eco friendly and sustainable operation, and on shareholder value. This is an even greater challenge when most organizations are increasingly dependent on external collaborating parties (the value network) to deliver end-user satisfaction. This growing interdependence is a function of increased competition, entering into new markets, and leveraging cost effective production.

Cloud Processes link and control the value-added activities in the value network and link them to the enterprise resource planning (ERP) processes. The business rules and terms and conditions that govern the value-added activities are managed centrally by the operational, tactical, and strategic functions to optimize your performance and to adapt to changes. The business improvements actualized by adopting Cloud Processes for the value network are dramatic, for instance, you can achieve ROI after less than six months.

By leveraging the Cloud Processes for the value network, BPO companies can add valuable services that enhance the business dexterity of the customer.

Lean Change Management

The requirements for running a business are increasingly dynamic in our rapidly and unpredictably changing environment. And your business’s ability to react to change has a vital impact on its overall performance. With centrally managed Cloud Processes, business rules, and master data, the business logic and terms and conditions between the participants in the value network can be altered and deployed globally within days.

eBuilder issues quarterly releases of Community Editions of its Cloud Processes. The releases contain new functionality, enhancements, and maintenance. These improvements are driven by the product roadmaps for each Cloud Process. They are based on factual, real-time information relevant for operational, tactical, and strategic decisions presented by the Cloud Process service for relevant target groups.

BPO companies serving multiple customers around the globe will be able to offer best practice BPO outsourcing that is differentiated by the value-added services and assets they add to the Cloud Processes.

Reduce the amount of capital tied up in assets

Leveraging the shortened lead times enabled by end-to-end connectivity, you can reengineer the business process and implement “on demand” sourcing, reducing the number of consolidation points for physical goods, thus reducing the amount of capital you have tied up in assets.

By adding services and assets to the Cloud Process, a whole function can be outsourced. In this case, the assets involved can be used more effectively by combining the needs of many customers. This means that your own consolidated assets on the balance sheet can be sold, and instead you develop a ‘pay-for-utilization’ strategy where the Cloud Process guarantees control and conformity with the internal business process. This means you can restructure corporate assets, giving you improved return on assets.

Boost your competitive advantage

The paradigm shift from the first wave of BPO to Cloud-Process-based BPO will take place in the coming five years driven by the ability to offer a “more-for-less,” dexterous way of managing the business in the value network.

The competitiveness of a Cloud-Process-enabled BPO company is sharpened because it offers lower costs, better transparency, shorter lead times in production and for implementing changes (agility), faster time to market, and a global reach.

One of the many purchasers of BPO services will be shared service centers that will function as the “master control tower” for their customers' end-to-end processes. We see this trend clearly within both the private enterprise sphere and the public sector.

Better information for decision making

eBuilder Cloud Process dashboards provide the operational, tactical, and strategic business information that enables digital management of your value network. Among other things, this gives the respective areas of responsibility the base on which to make the well-grounded decisions needed to monitor the agreed upon key performance indicators and service level agreements, key factors in creating and maintaining a competitive business. The need for relevant up-to-date information for decision making is met by deploying the Cloud Processes, which connect your value networks. They automatically monitor business events (business activity monitoring) in the entire value network and present relevant data on operational, tactical, and strategic levels together with business intelligence functionality that combines real time business events into clearly presented statistics for improved business decision making.

This takes management to a new level by focusing on deviations from contracted KPIs and on improvements rather than managing and monitoring operational transaction issues that have little or no value for the end customer. We call this digital management.

BPO companies play an important role in the operational and tactical decisions relating to the customer’s outsourced process, so they will be responsible for outlining their role in implementing the strategic overall plan for the customer. The Cloud Process’s ability to create transparency in the end-to-end processes, together with the business activity monitoring capabilities, ties the customer’s operational and tactical organization virtually to the BPO organization’s internal organization in a seamless way.

Shorter Lead times in operational processes

eBuilder Cloud Processes enable online connectivity end-to-end, access to real-time operational, tactical, and strategic information; and they provide best practice business rules. Automation of business processes frees resources from repetitive administrative tasks so they can be used to handle deviations and improvements. This leads to shorter lead times across the end-to-end flow, often reductions in the range of 10-90%.

These improvements are compelling because the Cloud Process’s end-to-end capabilities enable an online strategy for automatic Business Activity Monitoring together with real-time reporting of the results. And they ensure that the information end-to-end is of sufficient quality and always available in the entire business process.

BPO companies will enhance the customer’s business ability by providing shared resources and assets that will optimize the customer’s individual process by providing an "operational envelope" that an individual company cannot provide on its own.


IT Improvements

Lower Costs for IT operations

Most IT organizations have invested heavily in building an enterprise-wide IT infrastructure and ERP functionality. The focus has been on technical implementation, carried out by the business’s own IT organization or outsourced to IT consultants.

The historical trend has been to try to reuse more and more of existing investments fand resources and to limit the company’s own investment to what is unique within the company to create competitiveness. This can be seen in the evolution from mainframes to client servers, to the PC, to the browser; and from in-house developed code to standard applications. So far, most projects show a limited ability to leverage external assets and investments. This results in long lead times for implementation, unpredictably high costs, and a focus on cost reduction. In most cases, this results in the IT organization lagging behind in projects that add immediate business value and instead being forced to focus on reducing costs in managing the infrastructure.

Cloud Processes for the Value Network give the IT organization an opportunity to implement a strategy for seamlessly integrating all external business parties (the Value Network), a strategy that complements the existing ERP and IT infrastructure investment while extending the enterprise-wide business processes into the Value Network. In the short term, this lowers IT costs and enhances the value of existing investments because the Cloud Processes generate a clear and visible business value within a short period of time.

The Cloud Process implementation is completely different from traditional implementation. For a Community Edition Cloud Process, the implementation process consists of two main activities: Connect to Cloud and operation. The Connect to Cloud project consists of three parts: configuration of the customer-unique business rules, integration of the relevant internal systems, and the addition of unique business partners that are not already connected in eBuilder’s existing Business Process Network. This usually takes less than 15 weeks. Then the operation of the best- practice Cloud Process starts. The payment for the operation is done on a transactional basis. ROI has been achieved in less than 6 months for the majority of all the projects eBuilder has implemented.

The key to this favorable ROI is the degree of reuse. eBuilder Cloud Processes for the Value Network reuse all the 10 main resources of the Cloud Process implemented in our Accelerator SOA technology environment.They also reuse the seamless integration of the 10 different areas and the supervision and control services that ensure availability, quality in the information content (information entropy), and technical functionality. Because many customers share the cost of developing and maintaining this generic platform, the cost to the individual user is dramatically lower than the cost of implementing such a platform on an individual basis.

eBuilder’s Cloud paradigm enables a whole new way of using IT, where IT becomes the business, and computers execute the basic administration tasks that previously were based on human interaction. It also enables the IT organization to leverage joint infrastructure to address the challenges associated with creating efficiency in the Value Network and to participate in the business development.

The BPO Company that serves many different customers with onfe or more outsourced business processes cannot justify starting a separate project for each customer to be implemented, run, and maintained during the duration of the contract. Furthermore, the customer will use multiple outsourcing companies for different processes and will encounter an impossible situation in maintaining and developing these interfaces and business process integrations. In addition, the customer will be willing to pay only for the service provided or asset used, rather than the entire IT project. This fact will create poor profitability leading ultimately to a non sustainable business for many BPO companies.

eBuilder’s best-practice Cloud Processes open up a new opportunity for BPO companies to focus on the value added services provided and to leverage the many assets that are already available, such as supplier networks, logistic centers, transport capabilities, financial transaction reach, etc.