Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) is the latest trend in business world-wide. It began with outsourcing to nearby countries (or what’s known as nearshore BPO) then to far countries (offshore BPO). The accomplishments of offshoring, represented by high quality and low costs, has drew the attention of many companies to a wider use of offshoring, which is Knowledge Process Offshoring (KPO).
KPO offshoring means that you don’t just bring someone from a far country to do small, trivial or low-requirements tasks, you bring someone for the big, essential and knowledge-based ones. This sounds even more rewarding when you think of the wide spectrum of developing countries labor choice you have and the advantage of, still, being able to pay them less than their correspondents in developed countries. You may be lucky sometimes to find incredible talents that are buried under tons of economical, political or financial burdens in their countries, and waiting for someone to make good use of them.
KPO market analysis
It’s estimated that the KPO market is expected to grow from 1.2 billion USD in FY (Financial Year) 2003 to 16 billion in FY 2010. The following sectors are on top of the list of expectancy to grow:
– Concerning research
1. Data.
2. Finance.
3. Insurance.
4. Biotechnology and pharmaceutics.
– Integration and management services.
– Computer-aided simulation.
– Engineering design.
Things to be taken into consideration
When you consider outsourcing and moreover offshoring, you should determine exactly your needs versus your resources. Upon thinking of both many challenges will emerge, such as maintaining the quality, the time factor, precision, and confidentiality in some cases. After that you should estimate the number of the employees you want from outsourcing, having in mind who can do what for how much and how long.
A determinant of your choice can be the country. China’s labor is different from India’s which is even more different than Egypt’s. Each country has its own culture, financial situation and talents. As a result, it needs some research about many countries before you pick up your offshore employee.
The strategic value of outsourcing
Outsourcing as a whole has an important advantage to people whose work requires putting strategies along with dealing with details. Managing details, no matter how trivial they are, is more time consuming than strategy planning, although from the importance aspect it is the opposite! If you let someone handle your details you can come up with even better strategies than ever, just by focusing on them!
More benefits, less costs
Companies using outsourcing are continuously gaining efficiencies from around the world and new creative ways for problem solving. Even more, they can re-consider some of their basics!
Along with saving money, such companies can render their investments more beneficial by using them in growing sectors like technology.
On wider bases, shared production between companies in different countries allow both parties to save more money and to bring highly qualified, highly specialized and experienced calibers to do their tasks. Such calibers would have been totally unreachable in other cases.
Finally, it’s recommended for companies that want to grow internationally to continuously invest in infrastructure and find talents around the globe through many outsourcing providers that can help make the searching, and ultimately the growth process, run smoothly.