Business Models
Business Process Outsourcing
Also Known As BPO
Citation Formats
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A subset of outsourcing in which a company contracts a specific business process to a third-party service provider. BPO originated with manufacturing firms outsourcing parts of their supply chain, such as Coca-Cola, then expanded to back-office and front-office services and to information-technology-enabled service (ITES); the global BPO market was valued at approximately $302.62 billion in 2024.
Facts
Core MechanismA company contracts the operations and responsibilities of a specific business process, back-office functions such as human resources, finance and accounting, or front-office functions such as contact-centre services, to a third-party provider, which may be domestic (nearshore) or international (offshore). 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
IBM operates one of the ten largest global consulting and business-process-outsourcing practices, spanning strategy consulting, technology and systems integration and operations.
Sources
1. Wikipedia, Business Process Outsourcing
Wikipedialead sectionQuote, lead section
Business process outsourcing (BPO) is a subset of outsourcing in which a company contracts the operations and responsibilities of a specific business process to a third-party service provider.
1. Wikipedia, Business Process Outsourcing
WikipediaTypesQuote, Types
back office functions like human resources, finance, and accounting, or front office functions such as contact centre services.
1. Wikipedia, Business Process Outsourcing
WikipediaAssociated With: Technology Industry, Types of BPOQuote, Associated With: Technology Industry, Types of BPO
information technology-based, referred to as ITES (Information Technology Enabled Service)
Wikipedia, IBM
WikipediaAssociated With: IBM, Consulting sectionQuote, Associated With: IBM, Consulting section
With 160,000 consultants globally as of 2024, IBM is one of the ten largest consulting companies in the world, with capabilities spanning strategy and management consulting, experience design, technology and systems integration, and operations.
Open Questions (1 open question)
In what year, and in what industry, did business process outsourcing first take the form recognized today, rather than only general contracting-out of a business function?
The source article defines BPO and gives an early example (Coca-Cola outsourcing parts of its supply chain) under its Types section, crediting manufacturing firms with originating the practice, but it names no year for that origin and no year for when BPO became a distinct, named business-process category rather than ordinary subcontracting.
What would resolve this A business-history source giving a specific year or decade for when the term "business process outsourcing" was coined, or for the first documented contract commonly cited as BPO in its modern (rather than general manufacturing subcontracting) sense.
Business HistoryWikipedia, Business Process Outsourcing
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