To best understand the concept of the end-to-end approach, we must first consider the business services organization within the client firm. Effective client leaders in charge of back-office business services (such as financial and accounting services, human resource services, indirect procurement and supply chain support) operate their functions as a business-within-a-business. Such client leaders build world-class services organizations characterized by service excellence, low costs, scalability, flexibility, compliance and high customer satisfaction.
The journey to achieve world-class status, however, requires expensive, politically charged and painful transformation levers such as:
- Centralization
- Standardization
- Optimization
- Automation
- Technology enablement
- Labor relocation
Thereafter, world-class organizations continuously adapt and improve by managing end-to-end performance, solving problems with root cause analysis and rapidly deploying service solutions.
In the relationships we studied, the BPO service provider joined the client’s journey toward world-class performance at different points. In some, the client leaders performed the transformation themselves, and then engaged a provider to help operate, expand and improve the transformed services organization. In others, however, client leaders engaged a provider to deploy some or nearly all of the transformation levers in a model commonly called “lift and shift.”
These different approaches demonstrate that there are many routes to achieving world-class business services.