The outsourcing industry is growing at a rapid pace and India has established itself as a major outsourcing hub. It is becoming the world’s favorite outsourcing destination as outsourcing in traditional areas like customer care, financial services, technical services, media research and telemarketing, manufacturing, IT, ITES is growing rapidly. The client’s focus has shifted to business process excellence, speed to market, quality improvement, benchmarking to world-class standards.
There is increasing global competition and pressure on margins from emerging lower-cost outsourcing destinations. Outsourcing expenditure will certainly continue to rise and more countries will find outsourcing attractive in near future. Political issues & backlash over outsourcing is likely to significantly lessen over time as economies strengthen and companies will realize the significant cost arbitrage and benefits of offshoring. Going forward the vendor focus will shift from basic skills, costs and processes to domain knowledge, transition challenges, change management, HR issues and governance. Regional outsourcing hubs will develop as companies will take strategic near-shoring initiatives to minimize risk and leverage cultural and linguistic compatibility.
India can collaborate with other countries to leverage local knowledge of the business environment and language skills while providing its domain knowledge and technological expertise for successful outsourcing. The myth that Indian companies can only provide “software coolies” is soon changing as we have a large pool of knowledge workers in various sectors ranging from Pharmacy, Medicine, Law, Biotechnology, Education & Training, Engineering, Analytics, Design & Animation, Research & Development, Media and Publishing or even Intelligence services. This talent is soon being discovered and tapped by leading businesses across the globe resulting in the outsourcing of high-end processes to low-wage destinations. Hence Knowledge Process Outsourcing involves offshoring of knowledge intensive business processes that require specialized domain expertise. Here are some KPO services that can be outsourced to India in near future:
· Research & Development
· Business and Technical Analysis
· Learning Solutions
· Animation & Design
· Business & Market Research
· Pharmaceuticals and Biotechnology
· Medical Services
· Writing & Content Development
· Legal Services
· Intellectual Property (IP) Research
· Data Analytics
· Network Management
· Accounting Services
The emerging opportunities in knowledge services are attracting a new breed of entrepreneurs like lawyers, chartered accountants, doctors, engineers, scientists into the outsourcing business . Minimal entry requirements, low infrastructure and set-up costs will encourage the smaller technically strong companies to establish a KPO set-up. Unlike commodity services of BPO such as call centers, CRM or large-scale back-end processing, the minimum critical size for KPOs need not be very large. What is more important is to have a high degree of specialization which will allow even small firms to function profitably. Further, since the knowledge process outsourcing business is not necessarily scale driven; smaller business entities having total strength of around 15-20 professional are also gaining popularity along with concept of freelance work. This style of functioning is driving the increasing fragmentation of service providers. Research and Analysis outsourcing may soon be the biggest revenue generator in India as BPO companies decide to move up the value chain in their service offerings.
Outsourcing opportunities for India exist in other fields like financial research, content development, medical writing: animation, film, publishing, web services; human resource outsourcing: recruitment, training, Education, Nanotechnology and many others. Due to a large knowledge pool and a significant cost arbitrage, few countries like India, Philippines and China are front runners in providing outsourced services. After achieving great success in BPO, India is now looking for a big leap in KPO as well and it becomes a natural choice if we analyze the comparative costs of various aspects of KPO for different countries.
