In the age of RPA, AI we still have lot of lengthy documents of SOP (Standard Operating Procedures) in use today as part of outsourcing.  These are legacy ways of doing business that originated in the initial wave of outsourcing be it IT BPO or KPO.   Many of these didn’t take advantage of automation for various reasons, in same cases it was the reluctance of the business owners who feared for their jobs or wanted job security.  This is any leaders nightmare since these process often fail due to the human element involvement in executing looking at outdated documents.  Agreed, process need to be documented but not to a point they become useless to get work done efficiently.

The surprising element is proliferation of these and the belief of the business owners that hold on to these dear to their heart stating this works or this is the right way to do instead of looking at technology to reduce the sheer number of steps in each process. These are drag on business looking to be agile, innovate or reduce their time to market.  Some of these have become impediments to modernization or taking advantage of digital and emerging technologies.  With long term contracts some of these wait for its time to even get attention to modernize. The very existence of business is at stake with this legacy approach not to mention the hard and soft dollars spent on this besides lost opportunities.

Traditionally the operations team put out these lengthy SOPs to help enable outsourced providers run shops by the book.  Over a period of time these became a norm than looking to embrace technology and automate and thus reduce the process oriented work struck with human element getting it right all the time

These SOPs dont keep pace with technology changes happening in tandem  and remain outdated resulting in serious errors. These are high maintenance that leads to lot of wastage as well. Companies that have not embraced Agile, Scrum, Dev-ops suffer the worst fate of these lingering around slowing them down to make progress.  Bringing Operations and technology together will bring a more better outlook to retire these with the help of technology innovation.

The birth of RPA, AI, BOTS etc came out partly of this frustration.  The argument continues whether technology can solve all of these or let process written in SOPs drive operations.   Its high time both sides realized the importance of using technology and reduce the lengthy manual procedures written in old fashion SOPs and move towards a more competitive landscape.  Some  clients have problem moving these into RPA / AI and are paying lot more or taking extended time to ease into thEse newer ways of doing business effectively or completely bringing in new systems to take over with less cumbersome manual element.

In the era of self service the days of outsourcing to third party with a lengthy SOP for every process is almost near its end.  The earlier we adopt technology over writing business process the better we are serving our customers and adding to the bottomline.