Outsourcing

e-Procurement supports different types of outsourcing including staff augmentation and out-tasking, selective BPO and ITO and comprehensive BPO and ITO. For staff augmentation and out-tasking, e-Procurement supports the job requisition, matching, interview, negotiation, contracting and effort tracking and payment functions between acquirers and providers.

For manufacturing out-tasking, e-Procurement provides the contracting function, the management of the movements of materials, WIP and finished goods and the control of quality and wastages.

For selective BPO and ITO, e-Procurement supports planning, contracting and tracking of schedule, quality, progress, efforts, issues, costs and payments.

For comprehensive BPO and ITO, e-Procurement provides goal setting, discovery, strategic planning, contracting, transition and outsourcing project management functions.

e-Procurement allows the acquirer to define the responsibilities and skill requirements for different jobs that it intends to acquire staff resources for and then submit requisitions and the provider to fill the requisitions based on the availability of its matched resources and/or allow its freelancers to apply to the acquirer directly.

e-Procurement can automatically match the skill set requirements in the job requisitions with the credentials of the candidates. If the provider allows its freelancers apply to its acquirers directly, e-Procurement can also automatically push the matched job requisitions onto the job app of the qualified freelancers so that they can view what job opportunities  are available to them and use their job app to apply for the jobs and set up interviews.  All these can be done in real-time.

After the acquirer and provider agree on the staff arrangement, e-Procurement supports contract establishment and the management of service level, invoices, payments and penalty after the contract is signed. e-Procurement also provides engagement project management and timesheet functions to record and track activities, deliverables and efforts.

e-Procurement provides end-to-end automation for staff augmentation outsourcing.  Functions such as job opportunity, interview, engagement activity, output deliverable and timesheet are also available in mobile apps.

e-Procurement supports the following functions for manufacturing out-tasking:

• Keeping up-to-date information on the availability and capacity of out-tasking vendors
• Contractual terms and service level tracking
• Material, WIP and finished goods movement management
• Wastage control
• Quality control
• Vendor performance assessment

e-Procurement maps all out-tasking activities to internal manufacturing activities and manages their input, output and controls the same as if it is managing internal manufacturing activities. From a quality control standpoint, the WIP or finished goods done by the out-tasking vendors and internally are the same.

Since selective BPO and ITO often involve service deliveries, e-Procurement provides functions for planning, contracting and tracking of schedules, quality, progress, efforts, issues and costs and payments.

e-Procurement allows the user to define metrics or performance key indicators (KPI) targets as service level agreement to be embedded in the contract and supports the tracking of the KPI for performance based penalty and/or pricing.

Since comprehensive BPO and ITO require a lot of upfront planning, e-Procurement provides goal setting, discovery, strategic planning, contracting, transition and outsourcing project management functions.

Since almost all BPO/ ITO involve capability, capacity, speed, quality and cost improvements and some BPO/ITO involve selling-off current assets such  as data center, networks and servers in exchange near-term capital, e-Procurement supports clear goal setting and tracking for BPO/ITO initiatives.

After the start of the BPO/ITO, e-Procurement will keep track of the goals and results so that the user can see the discrepancies clearly between the goals and the results and take corrective actions accordingly.

Since comprehensive BPO/ITO often involve transferring staff, licenses, equipment, parts, facilities and service responsibilities to the outsourcers, e-Procurement provides tools to help the user identify different areas for discovery and perform quantitative and cost analysis in each areas to be transferred to the outsourcers.

e-Procurement allows the user to categorize items and record counts and costs. The quantitative information will be aggregated from lowest-level organizations to the topmost organization.

Since most organizations don’t have accurate quantitative information on the items that they will need to transfer to their outsourcers, they must perform the discovery quantitative analysis during the planning stage.

Since BPO/ITO is a realization of its corresponding strategies and projects, e-Procurement provides tools to assist the user to perform strategy and project planning.

A major strategy of BPO/ITO can be broken down into sub-strategies and each sub-strategy can be broken down into projects.

The strategy and project planning facility not only can help the host company to have better control on the execution of its strategies and projects, it will also help the outsourcers know better what needs to be performed.

e-Procurement provides contracting functions to capture the terms and conditions of the BPO/ITO and reinforce deliveries and acceptance that are in line with the terms and conditions.

e-Procurement supports project-and-milestone based deliveries and acceptance for products and services. It allows a number of delivery milestones to be in one or more projects linked to the contract. At the contract level, the user can view and manage all resources, activities, dependencies, deliverables, milestones and costs for each project individually or all projects collectively.

Comprehensive BPO/ITO require well planned transition. Getting staff and processes ready for comprehensive BPO/ITO can be a large undertaking. e-Procurement provides planning and execution tools for BPO/ITO transition management. The transition will be treated as a set of well planned activities. e-Procurement will track their progress and completion to ensure that transition is fully complete before the start of the BPO/ITO.

e-Procurement provides cross-organization and across-location project management facility for the BPO/ITO staff to record their progress and BPO/ITO manager to manage the activities and results. For operational BPO/ITO projects, e-Procurement can automatically generate repeated tasks according to the pre-defined schedule. For non-operational BPO/ITO projects, e-Procurement provides user-defined work breakdown structure and automatic tracking.