Achieve Productivity, Growth And Savings: Five Areas In Which Business Process Outsourcing Can Improve Your Business

Business leaders constantly grapple with the need to cut costs and improve operational efficiency. Perhaps now is the right time to reassess your internal resources and rethink your operations. Do you have the right number of people focused on the right activities to move your business forward? You may want to consider a trusted managed services provider such as Canon. Outsourcing gives you the business agility, flexibility and performance measurement to gain the efficiencies you need and to reallocate your dollars to the right areas to grow the business.

First it starts with a business process assessment to find operational improvement opportunities and areas to streamline processes. There are likely a number of functions that have not been reviewed for quite some time. For example, by outsourcing all or part of your accounts payable department, application forms or insurance claims processing, you can gain significant cost savings and efficiency advantages. These include greater staffing flexibility and shorter cycle times for processing documents such as invoices. Other areas to consider are digitizing your contracts, forms, applications, and incoming mail to improve the speed and flow of information between departments and react quicker to customer inquiries. To take it a step further, perhaps your warehouse or distribution center needs to improve their shipping speed. By teaming with a managed services provider that can implement the kind of process improvement and automation solutions necessary for advancing your business, you can have a unbiased assessment of real savings opportunities.

If you are a business leader looking to increase your company’s productivity and drive growth, here are ways to get started and areas to consider to improve your business.

1. Business Process Assessment

This is the first step in your optimization journey. The Canon Business Process Assessment is an in-depth, multi-day consultative review of your organization’s manual workflows and supporting systems, resulting in an assessment report, process improvement recommendations and detailed next steps to follow. The Business Process Assessment compares actual performance and potential optimal performance. You receive a comprehensive appraisal of work processes, technology and users to determine where efficiencies can be gained and the variance between business requirements and current capabilities. The analysis involves numerous workshops and/or interviews, including vendors or partners.

The results of the onsite analysis will be a detailed findings report. This serves as a comprehensive historical record to confirm your efforts and proof of behavior to date and any recommendations, budgetary estimates and timelines for change. Once the report has been presented in a formal setting, Canon is prepared to offer continued support and guidance since implementation and ongoing administration are often complicated and time-consuming. Proven training mechanisms are also available to ensure that your investment in the assessment process is realized.

2. Automation and Document Imaging

Rather than realizing the benefits of digital workflows, many organizations still grapple with manual processes and paper. The reason is that they lack the expertise. Canon can consolidate and digitize high-volume transactional documents as you receive them, as well as index, code and merge them into your workflow. This makes the documents easy to store, retrieve and manage.

Despite the availability of technology such as web forms, self-service portals and e-commerce networks, many business processes contain unstructured documents. Bottlenecks develop when unstructured data needs to be converted into digital format.

The Canon Intelligent Data and Transformation platform comprises our document scanning and processing capabilities and can be delivered onsite, offsite and offshore. The Canon solution accurately sorts paper and electronic documents based on their content, lifts specific data, validates it, and seamlessly passes it to workflows, business applications, and content and records management systems. Canon Intelligent Data Capture and Transformation helps businesses: increase the speed of workflow and improve customer satisfaction; reduce cost; reduce manual errors and exception cost; automatically index documents for records management and retrieval; minimize risk; and improve compliance.

3. Robotic Process Automation

New technologies such as robotic process automation are creating opportunities to automate repetitive processes and more efficiently achieve your business goals. Robotic Process Automation offers the potential to have software robots execute your current processes faster and more accurately, 24x7. This can help increase your return on investment and achieve other significant benefits such as improved accuracy and compliance, cost reductions and scalability. Organizations are implementing RPA to automate their key business processes and realize important advantages. What are some of the gains? Rather than the technology itself, Robotic Process Automation’s value is based on a number of business benefits that it can yield, including improved productivity, increased accuracy, enhanced resource utilization and better analytics.

4. Warehouse Distribution and Outsourcing

You face a difficult business scenario. While the complexity and velocity of your company’s supply chain continues to grow exponentially, demand for top quality service remains at an all-time high. In addition, you are asked to cut costs; yet, at the same time improve service levels, productivity and efficiency. Our comprehensive, integrated Warehouse and Distribution Services include distribution and inventory management, as well as warehousing and business support services to help you address your most difficult challenges. Our broad range of services includes logistics, shipping and receiving, environmental stewardship, warehousing and packaging, distribution and storage, quality control, technology and equipment management. Canon provides safety-trained, full-time warehouse employees and removes your burden of hiring, managing, training and developing staff. We identify your challenges and leverage our teams in operations, human resources, safety, IT and procurement to identify the right talent to drive performance and results.

5. Source-to-Pay Outsourcing Services

CFOs face challenges with their source-to-pay transformation initiatives. These challenges typically fall into the three categories of people, process and technology. Our comprehensive S2P outsourcing services address each of these categories. The Canon Source-to-Pay delivery model enables a scalable infrastructure for growth that includes: designing new workflow processes; enabling a greater level of visibility into spend; instituting a governance model; providing flexible teams that can be located onsite, offsite and/or offshore; managing your workforce and implementing state-of-the-art, best-in-class technology. The Canon Source-to-Pay Services include: outsourcing all or part of your sourcing, procurement and accounts payable process, Six Sigma and lead-based process analysis and design, technology efficacy analysis, source-to-pay automation tools, dynamic discount program management, supplier information and risk management and supplier network onboarding.

We can help drive productivity growth and savings in these five critical areas—as well as others in your organization—because we recognize that a well-planned, smooth business operation is the foundation for a successful long-term relationship. We have a team of analysts, change management and implementation resources available to find the areas of improvement and help you advance and grow your business.