Workflow for Outsourcing
Blog: All Things Workflow
There’s no question nowadays that the majority of work is being off-shored overseas, with the largest areas being customer service, bookkeeping and computer support.
Outsourcing is a strategic move that has become more common and favourable for many organisations, in order to cut costs and gain a competitive advantage. It provides the opportunity for organisations to utilise skills and expertise that were not available internally, without having to invest high amounts of money in recruitment or local expertise.
It provides important benefits of being able to outsource back end tasks such as data entry to overseas service providers to save money and resources, and then concentrate on core business activities.
Most organisations deal with a large volume of paperwork every day. With the increasing amount it can become difficult to manage, which often leads to errors and loss of information causing inconvenient delays and re-work. Especially in a large scale organisation this is an inefficient use of time, equipment and staff resources which can result in significant financial loss.
Workflow automation software can assist with this. It provides a structured, centralised system with data storage in the cloud, allowing you to effectively track business processes as they are completed and sent internally and to outsourced vendors.
Workflow software is ideal to assist with outsourcing work such as form processing. An example is a large scale insurance organisation that had implemented workflow software to replace their previous system.
Their previous arrangement involved handling insurance policies which were sent to various staff, brokers and other organisations through email and phone. The tasks involved staff making decisions, transferring documentation, communication and follow ups, all done through multiple communication channels making it difficult to monitor.
After implementing the workflow system, it allowed them to efficiently outsource back end tasks to service providers in Mumbai. The dozens of staff involved in processing the policies could then concentrate on other important issues, and the work was carried out by brokers in India to complete.
Main benefits of workflow for outsourcing:
- Lower costs – compared to Australia, labour costs are typically less in countries such as Asia and India.
- Better quality – access to the world’s skilled expertise at a lower cost. You don’t have to invest in finding, training and managing employees.
- Free up resources – allows you to free up internal resources for core activities, to grow the business instead of wasting energy on back end operations.
- Time difference – the difference in time means that work can be completed while your business is closed, keeping the productivity continuously flowing.
- Risk reduction – having an offshore partner means in the event of disaster, recovering their backups means you haven’t lost everything, which will assist getting your business back on track.
- On demand – temporary booms, seasonal or simply ad-hoc work, you can choose to employ more or less staff depending on your businesses situation.
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