Introduction to the Different Outsourcing Services

If you have a growing business, then you may need to consider contracting outsourcing services companies. In this setup, you will purchase the services of the independent company to perform a part of your business process.  Doing so will help you save on legal, training and logistics expenses of doing the tasks on your own. With some of your tasks outsourced, you will be able to focus your resources and manpower to core aspects of your business.

 

Interested? Here is a primer to different outsourcing setups:

 

BPO

BPO or Business Process Outsourcing is the most common type of outsourcing services. Here, a company hires another company to perform a part of its business functions. This is originally associated with manufacturing companies, like Coca Cola which outsourced the transport and distribution of its products. However, current BPO is more focused on human resources-related tasks.

 

For example, many companies want to have a tech-support team but they lack the resources to build and train one. They can resort to BPO and instantly form an online support desk with experts. The support desk will answer customer calls and provide technical support to your customers.  Outsourcing allows you to find skilled employees in the particular business process. The outsourcing company will take care of training them while you focus on core aspects of your business.

 

Other types of business process services include content writing, data entry, translation, editing, typesetting and even handwriting documents. If you want to build a website for your company, you can outsource it to website builders and coding experts.

 

KPO

Unlike BPO, KPO or Knowledge Process Outsourcing services are research oriented. KPO jobs require higher degrees of involvement from the worker and, perhaps, interaction with the outsourcing company. The jobs in this classification include an analysis and research that uses software and technical skills. For example, a company may hire a group of statisticians and actuarial mathematicians in a foreign country to predict the performance of their sales over time.

 

Right now, KPO services worldwide includes research on patent applications, intellectual property, business and marketing, biotechnology and pharmaceuticals. Legal consultancy and research on medical services are also being outsourced. Much of knowledge processing jobs in the west are being outsourced to eastern countries in Asia. For example, the National Association of Software and Service Companies in India estimated the current value of their KPO industry to be at 15 billion US dollars.

 

The Knowledge Processing Outsourcing services industry is much younger than the BPO, and it is rapidly expanding because of the recent advancements in Information Technology. IT outsourcing is a major category of outsourced jobs, and it is usually classified under KPO. Here, the hired company receives, manages and transfer large sums of data between the outsourcing companies and their clients.