Trends 2016: Metamorphosis from BPM to BPS

By Rajendra Deshpande

Digital transformation will play an important role in helping the BPO industry move from its BPM image to a BPMS market.

The BPO sector in India stands yet again at the cusp of an evolutionary phase. The integration of technology has played a pivotal role in triggering metamorphosis within the sector.

More and more companies are now focussing on building recognition as BPM (Business Process Management) players, marking not just a shift in perception but also indicating adoption of solutions and tools that positions them as an end-to-end service provider.

With technology becoming an inevitable component in business today, outsourcing companies have taken in the change in their stride and kicked up their heels to incorporate solutions that can help them serve their clients better and add more value to their business.

The coming years will see several emerging trends dominate processes and operations in the BPM sector. However, the most important trends that are catching up fast among players include SMAC, automation, metamorphosis into end to end service providers and move from BPM to BPS (Business Process Services).

SMAC-Catching up

Social media, cloud and analytics have become an integral part of the service industry’s sustenance now. To ensure better, quicker and more efficient processes, more and more players are now moving towards incorporating SMAC.

SMAC enhances collaboration and helps in adding intelligence to processing capabilities, thus offering superior services and increasing productivity within the organisation.

Robotics is another element that has been mooted but has proved its worth in enhancing business productivity. Even as the debate around automation and robotics continues, businesses will have to make robotics native to their services in order to be able to deliver intelligent and valuable insights to their clients.

The industry is also on its way to change the common misconception that BPO companies are concerned with only back-end or lower-end tasks in the spectrum of services.

The industry is now riding high on technologies such as robotics, cloud and analytics and is slowly evolving into an end-to-end service provider, which includes everything from outsourcing and consulting to customer experience management.

While bundling BPM and IT was the differentiator for larger IT companies, today several pure-play BPO companies are getting more innovative and IT-centric by forging partnerships with niche companies to offer integrated services.

In the years to come, pure-play BPOs will build enough capabilities to offer technologically advanced services and solutions and this will eventually lead to the blurring of differentiators between IT majors and pure-play entities.

Digital transformation will also play an important role in helping the industry move away from its BPM image to be recognised as a BPMS market.

Today, organizations are revisiting their business models and making their shift towards digital transformation in order to improve processes, enhance productivity and make service delivery more efficient and quick.

Besides focussing on improving service delivery to clients, players are now adopting tools that help their employees to collaborate and work better.

The adoption of enterprise social networks has emerged as a key trend among BPO players in the country. Going forward there will be more businesses that will embrace key enterprise specific features such as emails, discussions and forums across domains, knowledge repository etc. to enable seamless exchange of ideas and information.

The industry has matured over the years and has built the capability to tackle non-complex and redundant processes with the help of robotics; moved on from investing time and resource in back-end tasks to providing intelligent insights that are crucial to decision making using analytics.

The BPO industry should now shift their focus onto tackling more complex tasks with the knowledge and capabilities it has built over the years and move onto the next level.

Hence with hopes of a brighter future and stronger growth, it’s time that we all hail RAM - in this context Robotics, Analytics and Mobility – and pursue stronger growth figures for the industry.

The author, Rajendra Deshpande, is CIO, Intelenet Global Services, formerly  known as Serco Global Services