Business Process as a Service (BPaaS)
The transition of BPO to BPM to BPaaS
The term ‘BPO’ was once limited to call centre operations that took care of basic transaction-based processes only. The business model has evolved over the years and has incorporated best practices in terms of service delivery. In such a scenario, BPaaS offers several outsourcing models, including a full takeover model to a managed captive model to a build-operate-transfer model, each with long-term strategic goals in focus. The goals of BPaaS include optimising costs, scaling operations, enabling maximum efficiency, adhering to controls and compliance, minimising risks, etc. Businesses need to adopt a process model based one or more of these goals.*
How is BPO as a service different from BPaaS?
The evolution of BPO has been aimed at enhancing value and bring more focused outcomes. The inclusion of cutting-edge technologies - artificial intelligence (AI), robotic process automation (RPA), and others - has enriched BPaaS beyond measure. BPaaS and BPO differ in the following aspects:
- Structure:
- Performance:
- Service:
- Method:
- Transparency:
The legacy BPO model provides service outside of your organisation, which keeps your data at risk. However, BPaaS does not depend on a third party to schedule, process, and deliver business functions. The cloud computing model makes the process cost-efficient with the help of RPA and AI. BPaaS is a one-stop cloud-based control system for all solutions.
BPOs have a rigid environment and infrastructure, making it challenging to incorporate enhanced business processes and growth rates. BPaaS has an agile and adaptive infrastructure that supports business evolution, initiates growth with changing technologies, adapts as per the need, and is flexible. It is not restricted like BPO processes and works towards long-term business goals.
Businesses need to make program modifications to improve or enhance a BPO service. This makes the BPO process service restrictive, expensive, complex, and time intensive. This gives the solution owners less control over processes. In BPaaS, business owners play a key role in the development process. For example, they can opt between Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), or Software as a Service (SaaS) as their preferred platform for business development.
BPOs work on manual processes that are susceptible to errors. By design, they do not have automated problem-solving built in. BPaaS eliminates these risks by automating the services. It works on a cloud-computing model, which automates monotonous tasks. This reduces the chances of errors that were possible earlier because of manual handling.
BPO model is about offshore outsourcing. This can put your data at risk by lowering your control over its accessibility. It is also difficult to evaluate the trends and changes in technologies that can cause a loss of control over business data. BPaaS gives real-time access to data over a secure cloud-based platform. Automated processes generate adequate reports to maintain transparency, which is not possible in manual operations.
BPaaS solutions aim to reduce operational expenses for an overall lower total cost of ownership (TCO). You can use the BPaaS service on a pay-per-use model, which further saves the cost of operations. This model charges only for the duration of time you use the service rather than a fixed amount every month.
How can Infosys BPM help?
Our BPaaS offerings focus on providing strategic, long-term, goal-based process models for an overall reduction in operational costs. Our processes are delivered over an AI-first digital transformation model. They are agile to implement, enable acute response and immersive experience, and demonstrate high productivity. These offerings include:
- Accounts Payable on Cloud (APoC)
- AI-enabled Annotation Services
- Spend Analytics
- Digital Analytics
- Fraud Analytics
- Carbon Footprint Analytics
*For organisations on the digital transformation journey, agility is key in responding to a rapidly changing technology and business landscape. Now more than ever, it is crucial to deliver and exceed organisational expectations with a robust digital mindset backed by innovation. Enabling businesses to sense, learn, respond, and evolve like a living organism, will be imperative for business excellence going forward. A comprehensive yet modular suite of services is doing exactly that. Equipping organisations with intuitive decision-making automatically at scale, actionable insights based on real-time solutions, anytime/anywhere experience, and in-depth data visibility across functions leading to hyper-productivity, Live Enterprise is building connected organisations that are innovating collaboratively for the future.
