BPO to benefits from esourcing Capability model:

Ravi Chander, partner, North American operations, Anantara Solutions, outlines the challenges faced by the industry, the possible way out and the company’s strategies in this regard.The BPO industry in India is currently estimated at $11 billion. The industry, according to a Nasscom-Everest Group study, has the opportunity to grow five-fold to be over $50 billion by 2012.
However, realising this potential can prove to be challenging given the fact that cost arbitrage is no longer the source of competitive advantage for Indian BPO companies. It is a level-playing field, with global companies now offering the same value through out-located operations in India. Further, competing destinations like the Philippines and China are poised to overtake India in terms of cost competitiveness. Customers are also now asking 'what next?' after cost arbitrage. Anantara Solutions believes Indian BPO companies can address the challenges and realise their potential through strategic and operational excellence.
They can achieve these by going beyond providing outsourced business process services to providing solutions that address the specific pain areas of customers.The companies can identify potential 'white space' opportunities, where offshoring is yet to take off in a significant way; evolve the pricing strategy to be more ‘value-based’, and provide services that permit non-linear growth.
Some of the key initiatives that Indian BPOs can undertake from an operational excellence perspective include establishing the capabilities to implement a service strategy that is business solution focused.This includes creating capabilities in the up-front relation initiation and solution development processes, which is a key focus area for the eSourcing Capability Model for Service Providers (eSCM SP); re-architecting their metrics program to be capable of measuring business performance as opposed to service quality; driving greater optimisation of personnel and technology resources through consolidation, virtualisation and automation; focusing on knowledge management as an enabler of business solutions and continuous improvement in business performance.
The eSCM models are developed by the IT Services Qualification Center (ITSqc) at Carnegie Mellon University. The ITSqc is supported by an industry consortium comprising leading global players in the IT-enabled sourcing space. The eSCM models contain best practices, and are used as a reference to drive improvement in IT-enabled sourcing relationships. Certification to an eSCM Level provides organisations with competitive differentiation in the marketplace by providing an external validation of effective implementation of eSCM best practices. The eSCM models are relevant now more than ever, considering the changing order in global outsourcing