Understanding key business processes for business process outsourcing transition: industrial case study: discovering business processes by analyzing system's database

Abstract

Many organizations now outsource the operation of specific business processes to external service providers, which is referred to as BPO (Business Process Outsourcing). At a transition phase in BPO, the providers need a comprehensive and in-depth understanding of the target (outsourced) business domain. There are many types of the business processes. Most of them are often undocumented. A common way to discover business processes is shadowing (i.e., observing system operators' work). If providers observe all types of business processes, it is costly and time-consuming. An important part of the transition phase is to identify and understand the key business processes being outsourced. This can be costly and time-consuming, especially if shadowing is used. This report introduces an industrial case study of transition phase in BPO. In the case, we analyzed 1,960 records stored in the system related to the business processes for one year period system operation. Each record corresponds to one activity execution by a system operator of the business processes. We transformed the records into 152 distinct types of business processes and found 19 activities in all types of the processes. By evaluating the execution frequency of each type, we selected top four types as key business processes which include 10 activities which cover 96.8 % (1,898/1,960) of all activity executions. The key business processes were very helpful in comprehending the main characteristic of the target business domain in the transition phase.