The Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry is now looking at more skilled employees because of demand from clients worldwide.

The industry is moving towards the concept of business process management (BPM) from BPO because companies are now more like partners rather than just vendors as in the past, according to experts at the Nasscom BPO Strategy Summit 2012.

Gone are the days when employees were required for only ‘voice’ processes; now it is more of research and analytics, technology and accounting.

“Around seven years ago, the industry was treated as vendors, but today, we are genuine partners – from provider to understanding the business of the clients and countries, and their policies,” Vikram Talwar, Chairman, EXL Services, said.

It is also time to hire people and expertise from other verticals and industries such as CIOs and CFOs from manufacturing, retail and other sectors to this industry, said Swaminathan Dandapani, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, Infosys BPO.

Buzz words

The evolution has also meant that instead of doing business cheaper, the buzz words now are engineering, shop-floor automation and process restructuring.

“This is the time for us to move away from being called as BPO to BPM because that is what we do today, which is customer-centric solutions. It is the management of the full business process of a client, which is technology-enabled, to offer end-to-end solutions,” Som Mittal, President, Nasscom, said.

There are a lot companies which have brought down their processes to around six from eight or nine because they did not need any of those dysfunctional processes. “It is because of this that customers see more value in what they are doing and in spite of the fact that there is an economic downturn, customers continue to work with us to be able to leverage this value proposition that we have,” Mittal said. Other reasons are also because of the new technologies that have come in such as social media, mobility, analytics and cloud computing, all together termed as SMAC now, he added.

“There should be training at the States level by working with the respective governments and introducing these skills courses in the colleges and institutions to focus on recruitment process for this industry,” Keshav R. Murugesh, Group CEO, WNS Global Services, said.

He said Nasscom is also working on this programme to train youth in tier-II and -III cities so that companies can set up facilities there.

>ronendrasingh.s@thehindu.co.in

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