
Post globalization, business process outsourcing has entered into a new phase of providing enhanced services to the customers. KPO or Knowledge process outsourcing is subcontracting knowledge-intensive functions and tasks to the experts outside the corporation. Most of the companies, in this competitive era, are progressively turning to KPOs for increasing efficiency, saving time and overhead costs. This helps businesses to focus on its core functionalities while outsourcing the rest. As knowledge-intensive sectors are entering into a disagreement, it provides flexibility to the organization and offers resources for its business growth.
KPOs Signify Value Added Task
KPO, as compared to business process outsourcing, represents the high-end value-added services wherein firms leverage expertise, skill, experience, and domain knowledge of the professionals handling such superior tasks. It also deals with extremely information-intensive activities and tasks that require judgment, knowledge, and expertise of knowledge-based service providers. Call center, on the contrary, deals with the improvisation of the process efficiency of a business. It is focused on a single process, efficiency, and size volume.
Rise of KPO Industry
With the maturity and growth of the BPO industry, the KPO industry started emerging as a critical knowledge-intensive outsourcing business. The success, as well as substantial results accomplished by many outsourcing companies, enabled offshoring of high-end knowledge-intensive work. Knowledgeable and skilled workforce, sound infrastructure, improved quality, and time and cost feasibility are some of the important factors that worked in favor of the KPO business worldwide. The knowledge process outsourcing units established in India benefit from the effortless availability of trained and skilled manpower, technologically sound infrastructure, as well as the latest communications tools.
KPO: A Specialized Domain
The prerequisites for establishing a KPO are expertise, skill, and knowledge pertinent to highly specialized levels. This expertise is tapped by prominent businesses worldwide to take advantage of highly rising costs. Thus, knowledge process outsourcing is rapidly evolving as a business process requiring specialized expertise of the domain, such as designing, manufacturing, engineering and accounting fields.
Even though the major advantages of KPO are saving costs, it also provides added advantage such as leveraging the experience and expertise of seasoned experts in specific areas. Additionally, outsourcing these projects save time, provide flexibility, as well as resources to deploy more challenging assignments. Thus, outsourcing functions to KPO ensure better cost feasibility.
According to a recent study conducted by GlobalSourcingNow, the KPO industry is forecasted to grow at a compounded annual growth rate of about 23.12% between 2013 and 2018. The key factor contributing to this substantial growth would be the availability of huge analytical data with the businesses. In fact, KPO outlook is not limited to the ITES area only, but spans across other sectors, including business research analytics, market research, clinical research, publishing, and legal research documentation.