Transforming your Operations !!

“The first step towards change is awareness. The second step is acceptance.”

For decades the business process outsourcing industry has been largely transactional and operational. The ones who are part of the industry will understand the term “lift and shift” i.e. the operations which was sitting in the organizations' backyard(onshore) was shifted to low some cost outsourcing destinations. Yes indeed it was a good move to save cost, but with increasing awareness and maturity of the industry, this move became business as usual for large organizations.

Numerous service providers and similar value proposition flourished, India led the charge along with other offshore destination. The story stayed true for more than 2 decades but with changing customer’s expectation, adoption of new technology and changing regulatory environment played its part. Companies looking to keep up with the change scouted for newer opportunities which can add value to their existing operations i.e. reduce cost further and improve accuracy.

With flourishing competition between the service provider, and niche provider popping up in various spaces challenging the status quo of the industry. The concept of showcasing value in the relationship got everyone thinking towards a changing the operating model i.e. transformation.

Innovation in technology and ability to execute the operations with the maturity to improve customer experience without impacting the day-to-day operations becomes crucial.

Below are the major levers which are being applied across the industry to take the customer through this transformation journey.

Transforming Process: Lean – the core idea is to maximize customer value while minimizing waste. Simply, lean means creating more value for customers with fewer resources. Lean thinking changes the focus of management from optimizing separate technologies, assets, and vertical departments to optimizing the flow through entire value streams. The service providers are using the same thinking and implementing the benefits of scale along with improving the workflows of the processes.

Transforming People: Domain learning is the key to people transformation, with the rapid technology improvements the mundane and repetitive jobs, are frequently being automated and value addition can come from domain knowledge.

Transforming Environment: With regulatory challenges increasing for the customer also ensure business to think and innovate to ensure compliance which infuses opportunity for more technology adoption and less human interaction to ensure quality.

Transforming Data: With technology being adopted at an unprecedented pace, systems are generating huge volumes of data, which for a very long time was lying in the storage without creating much value. Now has suddenly come to life with cutting edge tool which can not only analyze the past data but predict the future. This is the story of big data which is helping business fight some of the biggest problems which for decades were considered unsolvable.

Transforming Technology & Tools: Automation tools from simple macros to cognitive, machine learning and artificial intelligence are available in the market. The service provider is investing in developing new platforms which can automate processes, partnering with niche players by applying their operations knowledge and transforming client’s processes.

Transforming KPI's: Customer are not looking at cost and accuracy as the parameters to judge their front - middle and back office operations, but are challenging service providers to deliver outcome based parameters like NPS (net promoter score).

There is a definite trend to make the operations accountable towards delivering business outcomes and improve customer experience. With an advent of digital technologies, mobile first approach and cloud adoption techniques the end customer surely will gain and so will the business.

The question remains are they ready for change?