Business Process Outsourcing (BPO)

BPO as the outsourcing of business functions or processes, such as procurement, to a third party. In these contracts the provider is responsible for performing and managing the outsourced function or process on behalf of the customer. In order to qualify under this definition, BPO contracts must involve the provider taking overall responsibility for the business process and not just supplying IT applications or services to facilitate the process.
BPO is the outsourcing of back office and front office functions typically performed by white collar and clerical workers. Examples include accounting, human resources and medical coding and transcription.
Business process outsourcing is the leveraging of technology vendors to provide and manage a company's critical and/or non-critical enterprise applications. Through the business transformation process of service-oriented transformation, which leverages the technologies and standards of service-oriented architecture, companies can increasingly leverage third party companies that act as business service providers. Business process outsourcingcan use off-shore resources, but is not required.