BPO Business Transformation through BPM?

The BPO business hub in India has been growing at the rate of 70% every year and is now worth $1.6 billion. In an industry that employs 1, 00,000 people, there is bound to be cost competitiveness due to the sheer numbers –in other words, high volume intellectual capital. For business success in what is already a crowded space, only 100% customer delight can make the cut and spell the difference between high profitability and a mad clamor to stay afloat.

So what is in the BPO success mix?

Cost savings obviously – the bedrock of the BPO industry

      Increased efficiencies through optimized SLA management

      Increased bottom-lines

      Response to change

In order to consolidate and find new differentiators, BPM promises operational efficiency in a sector heavily dependent on quality and rapid turnaround.  So Business Process Management and BPO are all about cutting costs but if you cut to the chase what is it about a BPM product that delivers value here? It has to be about getting your workforce to do more within tight SLA frameworks and to do it right.

Lauren Bielski in CIO points out quite accurately that BPM in BPO makes digital what used to be flow charts scribbled on white boards or sketched out on notepads.  This method allows subordinate processes to be more easily taken over by contracted outsiders in jobs such as loan processing, application support, or claims processing.

Business Process Management in this scenario can rapidly define, modify and deploy processes cost effectively while at the same time providing for continuous monitoring of performance and projection of resource requirements.

If we’re talking specifics, a robust Queue Management system designed to accelerate productivity with its dynamic queue allocation is integral to BPM for BPO. Common task dispatch patters such as FIFO, LIFO and round robin are well supported as are custom dispatch patterns, automatic, semi-automatic and manual modes of task dispatch.  BPM can differentiate in this one process that makes or break a BPO operation – project delivery.

Long term fixed priced BPO contracts in the backdrop of escalating operational costs have long been the bane of the BPO industry. However, the sector has shown potential to be profitable. Now with more and more BPOs focusing on business transformation with BPM software, maybe it can?

BPM framework for BPO

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The Proof is in the Pudding?

Following up on my post last week on what goes into the making of a BPM project, let’s talk a little more about Proof of Concepts (POCs). To truly gain traction from Discovery to Automation and to zero in on the right BPM software, a POC showing your vendor’s competency on a number of issues is essential. It’s simple really – Don’t Invest till you Test!

When it comes to evaluating a POC, there are the usual suspects

-         - Time to delivery from start to finish

-         - Sustainability (does the vendor have the bandwidth and skill to support optimization over a long time period)

-        -  Human reaction to change

-        -  Ability of the product to react to change

But apart from these the most critical test of concept is the scope of the POC. A scope bound POC which is a sub set of the actual BPM project offers enormous clarity to the process owner.  More importantly, as a BPM customer you should be cognizant of your exact BPM requirement before evaluating vendors ... the idea is to map the software to your needs rather than spend time and money on a POC to reinforce its inherent strengths.

A BPM customer should drive the outcome of a POC and test for compatibility with existing IT environments among other things. Introduce scenarios that test vendor agility and response to process change – indication of a strong services team means that you gain from the vendor’s BPM project experience when it comes to building a new application around the product.  For a BPM vendor of course, a well defined POC directly translates to cost efficiencies and in depth understanding of the client’s requirement.


Invest more technical resources in rolling out a POC and you have yourself a sustainable BPM customer who views you more as a BPM partner and less as a software vendor.

10 Point Program for BPM Excellence

What really makes for BPM project success? Visualizing a lean and efficient business structure, or how to “Think Big, Start Small, Scale Fast!”

1. First, identify a few processes that are costing the company’s bottom-line, increasing turnaround times or represent a compliance risk.
2. Put together a think tank of subject matter experts, process owners and forward thinking individuals from your organization to draw up a new goal based process.
3. Look at your internal technical skill set and various platforms in your IT landscape and evaluate BPMS tools from vendors that fit well with your existing IT investment.
4. Choose a BPM software vendor to develop an initial proof of concept (POC).
5. Run and test the process. Revise, revise, revise till you get it right.
6. Measure the new process for KPIs which are key to your business – common measurement indicators are cycle times, cost implication and customer satisfaction.
7. Deploy the process and continuously monitor the Business Activity for improved achievement on overall governance aims and better customer offerings.
8. Synchronize and Collaborate with teams on potential ideas for competing in the market and use these as BPM opportunities to scale up your BPM initiative.
9. Consider integrating your BPM software with your existing ERP system and extend the bandwidth of your process optimization tool.
10. Leverage organizational knowledge and market intelligence to constantly update your process with a trial and deploy methodology.

Redirecting resources to find and close business opportunities, rather than spend time looking for information spells Operational efficiency and results in better bottom lines.

Future Forward! - BPM Futuristic Trends

Future Forward - BPM Futuristic Trends :

How can Business Process Management optimize business outcomes and performance? Last year’s leading BPM events and the views aired therein by the industry’s thought leaders all bring out a dominant and somewhat worrying scenario – after a decade, Process Agility is still a pipe dream for organizations struggling to connect BPM technologies with their real world business processes.

Companies continue to focus on process automation as the quick fix to achieving Business Process Management goals without clearly defining end performance parameters and process improvement metrics. There is a need then to step back from the blinding array of available BPMS and concentrate on building operational resilience achieved through continuously introducing new process incidents for goal fulfilment and performance measurement. The need is also to identify a set of techniques that allow people, processes and information systems to adapt to changing patterns repeatedly.

The success words for the future of BPM include Activity Monitoring and Business Intelligence – a greater shift towards “predictive” instead of the “reactive” models being followed; Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) and Business Event Support as an important aspect of any full service BPM platform whilst evaluating best fit BPMS by organizations. BPM platforms with a strong focus on BAM, will come out on top by providing the critical visibility today’s embattled organizations need to establish relevant business goals and accountability.

The road this year will organically lead to social BPM - an ideal scenario where knowledge workers and partners model collaborative processes and BPMS designs address needs of unstructured process such as those that rest with knowledge workers. . As organizations begin to see the light about creating structures that are operationally resilient, BPMS as a technology takes a back seat. Key features of BPMS that support real world company goals for operational intelligence such as BAM and Process Designers for continuous process improvement take to the forefront of BPM as a solution to achieve operational success.

Business transformation has emerged as the key to sustaining organizational success and there is negligible concern on technology issues. Processes as a platform must necessarily come to pass as more and more users are vested in the belief that processes will eventually run in the cloud (both public and private).

The economic downturn has everyone looking inward and setting the house in order. Going forward, structured process automation will slowly give way to process management for unstructured processes – harnessing knowledge repositories within enterprises.

The emerging face of BPM extends accountability to process management as the means to optimize business outcome. This means that BPMS needs to keep pace as organizations start adapting process at the pace of business changes and not at the pace of their BPM package!

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