Enterprise Performance Improvement - New approach to back office operations

One more project failed....transition was not done successfully, team back in offshore never got how the job was suppose to be done. They anyway have 50%+ turnover, how they can manage!


I keep hearing this all the time and do understand that what is getting outsourced is a Process where human intervention is required. But one thing I fail to understand is how the process success or failure is measured? Most of the customers themselves are not aware whether the project is successfully run by their shared services team or the outsourcer. The business users always get a feeling that even though they are the owners, they do not control the process and outsourcing does not serve the end customers.


I tried speaking with various colleagues I know in the industry and outside consultants who advise on outsourcing engagements. More importantly, I had discussions with business owners / users who have experienced some sort of outsourcing either through internal shared service organization or third party outsourcer. The message was loud and clear - there is no silver bullet. The back office process still remains very much human centric and person dependent. The other major revelation was that there is not a single platform, which can help smooth functioning of outsourcing back office operations and customer engagement management.


On deeper analysis of the above two conclusions I drew, I provide the following arguments to substantiate my claim:


a. Most of the firms try to do to one size fits all approach to a back office outsourcing engagement - this applies both to the buyer and provider of the outsourcing service.

b. Lot of time is spent on legal agreements, team training, risk mitigation and drafting SLAs which is necessary. But except the first one, rest all needs repetition and continuous monitoring and tweaking throughout the outsourcing engagement, which is missed in the big picture.

c. No single Processing platform to manage outsourcing engagement, customer communication, reporting and a service channel to the end customers (both internal and external to the buyer organization) is missing.

d. Fragmented approach leads to creation of unnecessary steps in otherwise smooth work flow of activity list and creates more actionable data points without any technical sophistication leading to more wastage of time during initial transition and execution phase without any apparent benefits.

e. Escalation and communication are done on need basis - which defies the transparency and control premise, the very basis of the outsourcing initiative.


The list can go on...but one thing which captured my imagination was - how come no one has even tried to create a solution that can meet both buyer and service providers needs since the ultimate goal is to serve the end customers - better, faster and cheaper!


I believe someone should and will try in near future by creating a Solution that will provide a single Processing platform across processes and serve both buying organization and outsourcing organization interest without losing focus of the end customer. This solution will provide for transition management, training the team on period basis, SLA monitoring and reporting, act as a customer support channel and augment collaboration between internal and external users of the buying organization and outsourcing organization.


Such an application will bring together an otherwise fragmented back office outsourcing engagement or operations by providing control back to the business owners / users by providing a customer service channel that the end customer would choose and prefer using making it a successful transition from the beginning!


Let us see who from the Global outsourcing companies and shared services organizations will be the first one to show the light.