Jorge Muñoz - Suncapital, CEO
BPO (Business Processing Outsourcing) companies are those providers of technology and personnel who take care of the tasks that are not part of the core business of other companies, but are still essential for their operation. Tax, document management or process automation are examples of those areas that we address at Suncapital.
As this definition suggests, the human factor has always been of great importance in our sector. But something has been subverting this key. Yes, the technology. It is no mystery.
In the past, human work in a BPO was closely related to quantitative criteria: for x amount of tasks that a company needed to externalize, the BPO assigned a proportional number of human resources. It made sense in a world in which we did not have the technology that now provides us with invaluable support in the performance of almost any task. In addition, in the past, fewer processes required an analysis or a previous strategic direction because they were much more linear: of an action. a consequence was expected whose impact on the overall production chain was easily predictable.
«SUDDENLY, WE REALIZED THAT AN OFFICE COULD OPERATE WITHOUT HUMAN PRESENCE»
But then the Digital Revolution, also known as the Third Industrial Revolution, broke out. Thanks to technology, today we are able to drastically reduce work times, personnel needs and operating costs while improving effectiveness ratios. Systems such as OCR, which read and interpret the information in any document, RPA, which allows the robotization of complex tasks to develop them 100% through Artificial Intelligence, or Machine Learning, to optimize processes through machine learning are some examples.
And skipping this great temporary space of transformations, changes and sophistication, we come to 2020, at which time, buoyed by the Coronavirus crisis, companies have been forced to adjust budgets, which is fully affecting the outsourcing of processes and contracting of personal.
With both scenarios happening at the same time, many anticipated a death sentence to the worker. Suddenly, we realized that an office could function without human presence and that the digital transformation of the back office scheduled on the agenda had risen to the first place in the company's priorities. Mannose your head: technology is going to replace us! Nothing could be further from the truth. This new paradigm has been revealed, in reality, as an opportunity with a very special quality for those companies that have been betting for years on the automation of what today has come to be called Hyperautomatization.
Now, teams are not only still fundamental, but have been revalued. Tasks such as the supervision of artificial intelligence work, the validation of the final result, the screening and reporting of data and the communication of the added value to the achievement of the client's objectives depend more than ever on a disciplined, intelligent agile staff. The BPO worker not only has to be able to learn at the rate at which technology is becoming more sophisticated (at breakneck speed!) But also must be more committed and immersed than ever in the reality of the client to understand it, detect areas for improvement and be able to cross this knowledge with technological solutions, being able to propose an optimization horizon that only he can visualize.
«ALL THIS SITUATION BEGINS TO OPEN THE DOOR TO NEW BUSINESS WAYS, BRAND UTILITIES AND INNOVATION PROJECTS THAT ARE ALREADY BEING DISCUSSED»
In addition, as we automate more processes, the skills of the teams become more sophisticated. At Suncapital, for example, our management personnel have understood the fit of new technological functionalities in our business areas, which has allowed them to guide IT experts in the development of unique software on the market based on OCR, RPA and Machine Learning technologies. With these, we have managed to greatly expand our capacity to respond to increasingly complex customer needs. For example, in an economic activity tax project, we managed to robotize and file in just 3 weeks some 8,900 returns to different administrations. This for us it was a historic landmark.
«DEDICATING LARGE AMOUNTS OF TIME TO REPETITIVE AND TEDIOUS PROCESSES IS A THING OF THE PAST»
And this whole situation begins to open the door to new business avenues, brand utilities and innovation projects that are already on some tables. A large expansion of the horizons of action of BPOs, which are beginning to recognize their potential to act as consultants, may be just around the corner. A trend, on the other hand, is already consolidated in more mature markets such as the United States, where many real estate companies have their own intelligence centers from which they are capable of conducting market research or anticipating the detection of toxic assets from insights collected in their powerful databases. For all this, technology has opened the door to a different relationship between the BPO, our customers and our workers. Interactions now obey more qualitative criteria. Spending large amounts of time on repetitive and tedious processes is a thing of the past. Today, we focus our attention on the value contribution of our staff. We try to be relevant for the quality of our contributions and for the ability to find new solutions to old problems. We take responsibility for optimizing the situation for our clients, without being satisfied with leaving the office when a process or task has finished. Now more than ever, the success of a BPO is a reflection of the competence and attitude of each team member. And all thanks to technology. It seems that robots have made us more human.
SUNCAPITAL is a back-office process outsourcing company with a track record in taxation, real estate sub-servicing and digital transformation for clients in the real estate, banking and insurance sectors such as Santander or Servihabitat. Established in 2007, it has more than 80 employees spread over its offices in Madrid, Barcelona and Marbella.