Today, businesses of all sizes face a combination of challenges. Disruptive technology, fickle consumers, and unpredictable events like the coronavirus pandemic make for a challenging operating environment. Concentrating on your competitive advantage – your core business activities – could better insulate your business against constant disruption. Still, it isn’t always possible to divert most of your resources towards doing what you’re best at. That is unless you leverage process outsourcing for nonessential functions.
Businesses of all sizes already rely on business process outsourcing to excel, but are you outsourcing the right internal tasks? This quick guide takes you through what process outsourcing involves, its benefits, and the types of work you can outsource.
What Is Business Process Outsourcing?
Business process outsourcing (BPO) involves outsourcing non-core business functions to third-party providers. Businesses of all sizes can take advantage of BPO. Virtually any process from marketing and sales to human resources and supply chain management can be outsourced to an external contractor.
BPO providers with leading-edge digital infrastructure can deliver exceptional value. These BPO vendors are experts at working with organizations of all sizes and industries to enhance internal workflows, minimize manual and repetitive tasks, and more.
BPO provides time and costs savings as well as strategic advantages. These strategic benefits could include boosting growth and margins by empowering your operations to shift to and adopt digitization, automation, and other efficiencies more quickly.
What Type of Work Can Be Outsourced?
Mailroom Services
Digital mailroom services encompass inbound and outbound functions. With an inbound digital mailroom service, your BPO provider receives sorts, processes, scans, and digitizes your physical mail. They can sort digitized mail into predefined workflows and route correspondence to prescribed recipients to further facilitate business continuity. Inbound services can also include the invoice and cheque processing, and banking and reconciliation. Outbound mailroom services can attend to bulk communications with your clients and subscribers.
Anything sent from a physical location, as well as digital communications, can be taken care of. SMS, email, and paper communications can all be outsourced, along with courier management to streamline booking requests. In the face of unique challenges like the coronavirus pandemic, digital mailroom services help you to maintain critical business operations even when offices need to be shut down. Access your digitized mail instantly from anywhere in the world through a browser, and retain secure archives online for maximum space efficiency and overhead savings.
Bookkeeping and Accounting
The most significant cost associated with bookkeeping and accounting tends to be the labor costs required to maintain an in-house accounting team. SMEs, in particular, can find it more efficient to outsource their accounting function. By purchasing on-demand accounting services or accounting software, businesses access highly skilled accountants at a fraction of the cost. Invoice management can offer similar benefits, allowing midsized companies and enterprises to outsource a highly repetitive workflow and effortlessly manage high volumes of invoices.
Your BPO partner can receive, process, scan, and archive all invoices. Invoice processing can include capturing header and line details via optical character recognition (OCR) for accurate, fully automated sorting and directing into specified workflow channels and ERP platforms.
Marketing
Marketing is critical for business growth, and it’s another function requiring specialized talent. Maintaining an in-house team can cost your business a significant amount of money. Marketing teams bring highly specific skill sets like search engine optimization, online advertising, social media management, graphic design, and creative branding. By outsourcing marketing and advertising, you could considerably reduce your budget and access the very best marketing professionals in the field.
Recruitment
Recruitment is another commonly outsourced business function. Hiring new staff isn’t merely time-consuming; it can be an expensive process, especially if the hiring process results in the short-term turnover of the new team member. For these reasons, businesses often opt to work with outsourced recruiters. These recruitment partners bring experience, expertise, and specialist knowledge to identify the best candidates in alignment with your short- and long-term business strategy. They can also bring value with streamlined processes for licensing, accreditation, and other checks.
Managed Services
Managed services, beyond the traditional IT definition of the term, is another BPO process delivering high cost and process efficiencies for businesses. Managed services is a broad function. It can include corporate services like mailroom and courier services, supply chain management to optimize supply and distribution channels, and efficient records management. Managed services can also include executive hospitality, which can cover receptionist services, human resource management, from recruitment and talent development to performance reviews, and more specialist processes like claims handling.
What Could Your Business Be Outsourcing?
Business process outsourcing can be a useful strategic tool, freeing up resources and labor so you can concentrate on your core business functions and value-add activities. A further advantage is any risks connected to each service are outsourced to the third party.
At a practical level, BPO also helps lower labor costs and overhead expenses while controlling cash flow. Instead of having to maintain in-house teams, you can access the very best experts and resources in respective functions by contracting on an as-needed basis. In this way, BPO allows you to differentiate yourself by doing what you do best, remaining agile and dynamic in structure, and staying ahead of competitors.
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