Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) allows you to focus on what you’re best at in your
business and offload other important work to those who know how to handle it with a level of expertise and capability that you don’t have.
In order to fully understand the benefits of BPO, let’s consider the example of an international shipping company.
Now, “ABC Commercial Freight Shipping” knows how to get any type of cargo from one point to another anywhere in the world. It’s been in the business for years and has developed a global network of reliable partners and vendors on whom it knows it can rely for outstanding service.
However, in addition to land and sea routes, doing business in the international shipping industry requires the successful navigation of massive amounts of paperwork. Now, the shipping company has access to all the information it needs to complete the paperwork, but the process of gathering that required information from source documentation and transferring it to the appropriate fields in each piece of paperwork creates a ton of administrative level work, and if you multiply that by the number of separate parcels you’re shipping, the workload quickly becomes huge.
This is where BPO can step in. Instead of hiring an army of admins to manually handle a workload that is outside of their company’s “wheelhouse,” the shipping company could call Imaging Office Systems and inquire about an RPA enabled/cloud solution for capturing, managing, and intelligently processing all the paperwork for its shipping jobs. They’d discover that, yes, we can plug into this kind of system…and take advantage of the content experience our leadership in the industry has gleaned in over 50 years. The solution would be robust and flexible enough to adjust to changing requirements and shipping regulations.
Read on to learn about other scenarios in which Business Process Outsourcing could provide benefits to your organization.
More Ways Business Process Outsourcing Can Help Your Business
Digital retrieval of data from stored microform/paper records: We can take over responsibility for storing paper-based and microform records by moving them to one of our highly secure enterprise storage facilities and providing digital conversion/scanning services with on-demand digital file delivery. If you’re not obligated to keep your records in such obsolete media, we can convert it all to digital and store it in a cloud-based digital repository.
Automated processing of HR documentation: In the HR department, information comes in from a variety of sources, such as online forms or electronic applications, digital and snail mail resume submissions, and various reference submission apps. Imaging Office Systems can implement a solution to capture, process, and export the information in the format required for your content management system, HRIS or any other type of business application that you may want to use.
Capturing invoices and entering and processing them in accounts payable workflow: Processing invoices is a very labor-intensive task, but it can be automated to save huge amounts of time and effort. This type of automation can be set up as a bi-directional sync that transfers data back and forth, enhancing real-time visibility into your business. Invoices can be automatically routed to the right person for approval and follow a set of pre-defined rules that, for example, could route an invoice according to the vendor’s name…or it could be set to trigger two tiers of approval above a certain dollar amount. Automated AP can also build in segregation of duty controls. For example, an AP manager may oversee the data capture of an invoice and routing, but a second person might be slated to approve an invoice before it gets paid.
Snail Mail Pick-Up-and-Scan Service: One of the factors that may keep companies from embracing more of a remote working culture may be the need to continue receiving and distributing their snail mail in a timely manner. Imaging Office Systems can help relieve this worry by providing a pick-up-and-scan service. We’ll pick up the mail, scan it, and deliver it electronically to the addressee.
Other benefits of business process outsourcing and automation:
- Business process outsourcing and automation creates a digital audit trail, so you’ll always know who did what and when. This capability is important for companies that operate under strict regulations or security conditions.
- Process automation helps companies maximize resource utilization by pushing work to employee queues, which keeps them busy.
- Tie together multiple business systems, and eliminate the need for moving back and forth between native application interfaces.