COUNTRY FOCUS : AUSTRALIA

Some of Australia ’ s largest companies had to rethink their offshoring strategies overnight due to the COVID-19 pandemic . Greg Eyre , VP ANZ for Blue Prism , explains how intelligent automation through a digital workforce can help at this challenging time .

outsourcing has taken a massive battering over the past four months as the world continues to reel from the impact of COVID-19 . This has led to a long-lasting change in how businesses will operate moving forward .

Some of Australia ’ s largest companies , particularly in the telecommunications , banking , government , aviation and other services-led sectors , felt the full force of the pandemic and had to rethink their offshoring strategies overnight . Large portions of workforces suddenly became unavailable overnight , impacting the smooth delivery of call center , IT and business process workflows conducted on behalf of Australian customers .

It ’ s a sobering realization how unprepared many organizations were to support ongoing operations in the face of a widespread labour shortage .

With India and the Philippines , the two major outsourcing locations for Australian businesses , call centers and support operations either closed or significantly reduced staff in these countries due to social distancing rules . Many support staff were ill-equipped to work remotely , due to inadequacies in the technology , Internet or living conditions required to support them .

While call center operations have been heavily impacted , so too have the many back office business process outsourcing services that Australian businesses offshore . These are the repetitive , trivial and mundane tasks that are outsourced due to cheaper labour costs , such as data input , loan processing , accounts payable and receivable , expense processing and digitizing of document streams .

Those impacted were forced to rethink their offshoring strategies overnight . Most already had a Business Continuity plan in place that enabled them to switch operations elsewhere if a particular city or country became unavailable . But very few took into account what happens if all outsourced centers suddenly become unavailable , or at least working to a significantly reduced capacity .

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