India is the global leader in IT-enabled services (ITeS) or more commonly referred to as the Business Process Management market. In FY 2021-22, the sector earned $44 billion in revenues and directly employed 1.4 million with several multiples of that being employed indirectly. The addressable global BPM market this year is estimated at $254 billion and is estimated to grow to $336 billion by 2025.

The industry has reinvented itself several times, even though it is a relatively new sector. While BPM 1.0 was all about cost-saving and labour arbitrage, in BPM 2.0, the emphasis was on operational excellence through efficiency and quality of processes. BPM 3.0 heralded the advent of deep technology and domain expertise. Now, there is a shift toward BPM 4.0, which focuses on delivering business outcomes while ensuring resilience and agility.

To enable BPM 4.0 to become a reality, there are multiple challenges. One of the biggest challenges is to have a skilled workforce and the Indian BPM industry needs to focus on training the workforce for a new era with new technologies.

In this BusinessLine – Nasscom round table, Deputy Editor N Venkatesha Babu talks to Sukanya Selvarajan, Innovation Head - CFO Operations at TCS; Prashant Achanta, CTO of Firstsource; and Amneet Chowdhury, VP and Global Head for Infrastructure Technologies, Sutherland Global Services about the challenges and opportunities in the BPM 4.0 evolution.