Offshoring – Operational Efficiency
A large number of financial services organisations have embarked on some form of offshoring and outsourcing over the past 15 years.
This range’s from outsourcing of a specific activity or business process through to creating a captive offshore business unit.
The original drivers of offshoring and outsourcing was to reduce costs, improve efficiency and to provide a more flexible workforce, whilst these benefits have been recognised, companies are now seeing an erosion of this benefit as labour costs and competition for resources increases.
Questions you should ask
In order to ensure your offshore strategy continues to deliver benefits even as costs rise, it is important to ask these questions.
- Could the offshore centre do more, are they ready to move up the value chain?
- Is the offshore centre efficient?
- Can technology improve the efficiency of the offshore centre?
- What is the longer term offshore strategy – are we prepared for continuing labour cost increases.
Ducksoup Consulting can help you answer these questions. We have experience in working with offshore centres, assessing operational efficiency, recommending areas to remediate and providing metrics to measure progress.
Below we have detailed three areas we would assess as part of any review into ‘Offshore operational efficiency’.
Resource Assessment
Assessment of the capability of the current team, are there knowledge gaps that need to filled, is additional training required.
What is causing resource attrition, are experienced resources leaving because of a lack of challenges.
Could the offshore team support additional business processes, potentially more complex or more business critical processes.
Offshore centre efficient?
What are the offshore resources focused on, are they efficient, how much support is required from resources in other locations.
Has there been an assessment of process standardisation and orientation, are there teams of resources doing the same or similar activities.
Is there common documentation, procedures, methods and approaches for the business processes?
Application of Technology to improve Efficiency
Assess individual Business Processes to understand whether there are process improvement areas, can process steps be eliminated, combined etc.
Can Robotic Process Automation (“RPA”) be applied to business processes or to sections of the business process?
Conclusion
At the conclusion of the ‘Offshore Operational Efficiency’ assessment process we are then in a position to remediate any issues, create metrics to track process improvements and implement a longer term plan for the offshore centre.
For further information on how Ducksoup Consulting can help you, please complete the contact form on the Insights page.
