Friday, March 28, 2008

Business Process Outsourcing, Increases the Flexibility of Business Organization

BPO is a big impact to all business sectors, because it helps to increase the flexibility of the company. It contains the transmission of processes along with the associated operational activities and responsibilities, to a third party with at least a guaranteed equal service level and where the client contains a firm grip over the (activities of the) vendor for mutual long term success.

Most services provided by BPO vendors are offered on a fee-for-service basis. This helps a company becoming more flexible by transforming fixed into variable costs. A variable cost structure helps a company responding to changes in required capacity and does not requisite a company in investing in assets and hereby making the company more flexible.

Outsourcing of for instance a fraction of the workforce provides firm flexibility and reconfiguring resource deployments and reduce response times to major environmental changes.

BPO has another way to contribute to the company’s flexibility is that a company is able to focus on it’s core competencies, without being burdened by the demands of bureaucratic dictate. All of their key employees are herewith released from performing non-core or administrative processes and can invest more time and energy and building the firms core businesses.

It means, which of the main value to drivers to focus on; customer intimacy, product leadership, or operate excellence. It exemplified by for instance in the case of Dell.
Focuses to one of these drivers instead of more help a company create a competitive edge.

There’s another way or third way in which BPO increases organizational flexibility is by increasing the speed of business processes. They are using techniques such as, linear programming reduces cycle time and inventory levels, which reduces the company’s slack. Supply chain management with the effective use of supply chain partners and business outsourcing that increases the speed of several business processes, such as throughput in the case of manufacturing company.

Lastly, in the organizational life cycle, flexibility is seen as a stage. For an instance in the case of Nortel, which used to be a very rigid a bureaucratic organization. BPO helping the company to transform from a bureaucratic organization into a very agile organization by means of BPO. Ambitious growth goals can hereby help maintain by a company, which do not fit with regular incumbent strategies. Therefore BPO allows firms t retain their entrepreneurial speed and agility, which they would sacrifice in order to become efficient and they greatly expanded.

No comments: