BPO --> KPO --> EPO

Yes - now a new one ;-) Engineering Process Outsourcing (EPO)!! Outsourcing engineering services to India holds enormous potential. With a large number of labor driven and repetitive tasks, it fits the outsourcing bill to perfection. The labor-intensive engineering processes that can be outsourced are structural drafting and detailing, conversion services, cost estimations and a lot more.

Government of India has undertaken a survey on the scope of Engineering Process Outsourcing (EPO) for Indian companies, the Engineering Export Promotion Council (EEPC) has conducted the study and it claims that EPO business would grow by 10 times in the next seven years and will touch $30 billion.

Tall claim? I don’t know. But they certainly are talking figures. EPO is expected to keep the Indian BPO story rolling.

Read on....

The KPO Compass

When the service industry in India started, everyone spoke of "Call Centers" (apart from software development of course). That is because, by and large, it really was nothing more than voice calls (inbound and outgoing). Then, companies started adding "non-voice processes" which gave birth to a new term - "ITES or IT Enabled Services". Time went by, and these things were called "BPO - Business Process Outsourcing". And then came KPO which broadly means the outsourcing of various kinds of "knowledge work".

Knowledge Process Outsourcing has definite connotation and can not be used for all kinds of the outsourcing activities. Broadly speaking, KPO involves the following activities:

• LPO

LPO stands for legal process outsourcing. LPO a breadth of legal processes, such as patent application drafting, legal research, advising clients, writing software licensing agreements and drafting distribution agreements.

• RPO
  

Kiran Mazumdar Shaw coined this term. RPO means Research Process Outsourcing. Clients outsource their R&D work and RPO is most popular in the biotech industry.

• HRO
  

HRO stands for Human Resource Outsourcing. HRO comprises activities such as, payroll management, training, staffing, retirement and benefits planning, risk management, compensation consulting, etc. These activities are outsourced by which the client can concentrate on their core competency.

• MBPO
  

MBPO stands for Medical Business Process Outsourcing. Medical transcription, billing, claim processing, etc. are the chief activities of MBPO.

As time goes by, processes mature, and new players try to carve out new niche areas and lay claim to it, new terms are coined. But at the end of the day, it's all the same idea, just a different domain.....

Offshoring!

Why Outsource to India?

The answer is simple. Outosurcing to India cut costs by about 50% ;-) Outsource to India for technological agility, quality, flexibility, cost control, time-to-market and competitive advantage.

Here are some interesting facts I found on IndiaWebDevelopers relating to outsourcing:

• India exports software to 95 countries around the world: outsource expertise in global methodologies
  
• 82% of the US companies ranked India as their first choice for software outsourcing
  
• Bill Clinton applauds India 's brainpower: says Indian-Americans run more than 750 companies in America 's Silicon Valley . "You liberated your markets and now you have one of the 10 fastest growing economies in the world," said President Clinton.
  
• Bill Gates says India is an IT superpower: strikes strategic alliances with Wipro and Infosys to develop applications on the .Net platform
  
• Outsource to a mature industry with world-class systems, systems and quality. Of the 23 software companies in the world that have achieved the prestigious SEI-CMM Level 5, 15 of them are Indian. India will soon have the highest number of ISO-9000 software companies in the world, according to Nasscom
  
• IT is one of the Government of India's top five priorities.