Most business and IT executives understand the basic planning requirements for initiating the outsourcing of processes and systems separately. Platform-based BPO requires a thorough understanding of process Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), their process drivers, business and financial policies and controls, adapted BPO process design blueprint, enabling system configuration mappings, and such. An organization with fragmented processes and systems would need a different roadmap when compared to an organization that has implemented a common platform, but unable to realize the full potential of the same. An experienced BPO provider with requisite platform skills should develop a customized roadmap to be implemented at a measured pace to suit an organization’s change readiness.

Planning the transformation
As with BPO and systems development, the right place, time, and model are key decisions. Reengineering roles, transferring knowledge, and monitoring operations in real time are critical planning parameters to consider.

Location of data and business-continuity planning
Data privacy and local regulatory needs drive the need for location of data. Providers need to factor this into their platform BPO offerings and provide an enhanced level of data security and ability for business-continuity planning through their global data-center partnerships and service delivery centers.  This is an important factor for consideration for small and mid-sized organizations that do not have the scale or resources to manage these on their own.

Proprietary vs. COTS vs. SaaS platform?
This decision depends on business and commercial factors.  Usually, Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS--like Oracle, SAP, Siebel, PeopleSoft, and many more) based platform solutions offer greater ability to customize processes based on configurable parameters versus Proprietary and SaaS-based solutions. Also in SaaS-based solutions, data is separated "logically" versus "physically" in an outsourced scenario--hence the organization will need to factor in the type of data residing in the business process while making an appropriate choice. SaaS-based platforms offer a low-cost entry point vs. traditional COTS solutions, although as mentioned above, special BPO licensing provides an opportunity for a COTS solution with SaaS like pricing.

Sequencing and prioritization
When companies outsource processes, tasks that involve least interaction with end clients / business partners are moved first. Similar, approach can be followed in case of platform BPO--starting with transactional F&A processes like AP and AR, followed by more contextual processes like consolidation, planning / budgeting and forecasting. 

Training and knowledge transfer
Since platform based BPO services have a greater degree of standardization, dependence on client SMEs and trainers is significantly reduced.  With largely standardized adapted process design and enabling systems, the time, effort and eventual cost of transition is minimal to an organization. Investments in building training content, training instances/modules and product specific trainers will have significantly higher payback. Time and costs thus saved can be spent to baseline current activities and focus on “To Be” performance management through agreed business outcome based KPIs. 

Unique governance requirements
Platform BPO governance requires alignment of business and technology leaders on the customer side first since it is by nature a portfolio of business services with embedded system(s). Also to be truly successful, organizations need to adopt a longer term partnerial approach to enable a governance model that is focused on enhancing common business outcome (effectiveness) metrics versus traditional hygiene based (efficiency) metrics separately for processes and systems.

[The Hitchhiker's Guide to Platform-based BPO is a series of articles on Platform-based BPO model. It is an attempt to focus on each of its capability areas and the existing best practices as per the model. To read the first part, click here.]