Smarter Outsourcing: An executive guide to understanding, planning and exploiting successful outsourcing relationships

Benchmarking BPO: a do-it-yourself approach

In the context of CIPs, a further word of caution is in order about BPO deals. Because outsourcing of large areas of the back, middle and front office is so new, there are as yet no formal benchmarks commonly available. True, there are indicators – so an insurance company will understand the industry’s average cost of maintaining a policy, or an airline will know the capacity and relative cost base of its competitors. But these are broad indicators, not true outsourcing benchmarks.

There are no Gartner or Compass benchmarks for BPO as there are for ‘pure’ technology outsourcing – nor indeed are there recognized standards yet. The whole BPO arena is too new and too broad for specialists to have emerged ...