BPO handbook launched

The launch of the "BPO and Sourcing Dictionary" at the Dialog Auditorium recently was welcome news to those involved in the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry in Sri Lanka.

BPO globally is in the ascendancy and is a multi-billion US dollar industry. India has already captured a larger share of this market with its early mover advantage and through their vision in advance on resource capacity building programs. Today, India's BPO earnings which are in the range of around $ 14 Billion US are growing steadily.

Sri Lanka's BPO industry compared to India is a mere novice looking to grab a small share of this growing and lucrative market. Sri Lanka as a preferred outsourcing destination is slowly but surely looking to gather momentum. The evidence is clear.

A T Kearney in its recent Global Services Locations Index (GLSI) ranked Sri Lanka as 21st. It also ranked Sri Lanka as the fifth in terms of financial attractiveness ahead of India and China.

Gartner said Sri Lanka within the top 30 outsourcing destinations in the world among which Sri Lanka was ranked ninth within the Asia Pacific countries.

A recent IBM survey ranked Sri Lanka as 12th in the top ranking destinations in their global locations trends report. The Global Services magazine that performs annual outsourcing industry analysis globally has ranked Sri Lanka amongst the top 10 emerging global destinations.

The vision of SLASSCOM (Sri Lankan Association of Software and Service Companies), the over-arching body that acts as the catalyst to grow the Sri Lankan IT and BPO industry is to become a one billion US dollar earner by 2015.

To this effect, one of the key obstacles that Sri Lanka needs to overcome is building a Human Resource Capability to take on the BPO related work ("Capacity Building Program").

A book such as the "BPO and Sourcing Dictionary" is an invaluable learning aid to accelerate this process further. It is a handbook that must be given to every single employee by the BPO companies HR and learning divisions, so that it provides enhanced knowledge to employees in the BPO industry to further in terms of understanding the industry specific link language.

The book will also be a great asset to students who are looking for a career path in this lucrative industry. As part of their learning process of the BPO industry, they will now have the ability to learn the related "lingo", so that their initiation to this industry could become somewhat seamless.

This kind of learning aid not only supports the supplier side of the outsourcing industry, but is laso a great knowledge source for the clients who are looking to set-up their own Shared Service Centres (SSC) or looking to outsource their non-core processes either locally or internationally to a third party outsourcing supplier.

The employees involved in this process will understand the various industry related "jargon" used when communicating with the suppliers.