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Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) is the strategic delegation of non-core business functions like finance, HR, IT, and customer service to specialised third-party BPO providers. For Australian businesses navigating rising operational costs and the urgent need for digital transformation, BPO services offer a fast, flexible path to streamline business operations and drive scalable growth.
BPO enables you to:
Whether you're looking to outsource back-office tasks like accounts payable or front-line roles like customer support, BPO can help you modernise operations and stay competitive. Canon Business Services delivers customised BPO services built for agility, compliance, and efficiency—making it easier to transform your business operations with confidence.
Australia’s race toward full-scale digital transformation is accelerating, yet many CIOs and operations leaders find themselves shackled to manual workflows and stretched teams. You’re expected to drive innovation, cut operational costs, and delight customers—all while legacy processes drain budgets and talent.
The result? Projects stall, customer queries linger, and your best people spend nights reconciling invoices instead of refining strategy. KPMG reports 93 % of local firms have fast-tracked transformation plans, but only 40 % have scaled them. The gap between ambition and execution is widening—and competitors exploiting Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) are pulling ahead.
This practical guide from Canon Business Services ANZ shows how to deploy BPO strategically: which processes to outsource, how to safeguard data, and how to measure ROI without losing control.
Read on for a clear, step-by-step roadmap, real-world examples, and governance tips that turn BPO from a cost-cutting tactic into a transformation engine.
By some estimates, digital transformation — defined by Salesforce as the process of using digital technologies to create new or modify existing business processes, culture, and customer experiences to meet changing business and market requirements — represents a $315 billion opportunity for Australia.
Whether your enterprise falls into this category — or whether you anticipate joining those pursuing BPO in order to create or sustain a competitive advantage — it is critical to know what you can outsource, why doing so may be beneficial and what challenges you may encounter along the way.
Use this Canon Business Services (formerly Converga) guide to help your organisation make an educated decision on how to implement BPO in a thoughtful and strategic way.
“Business process outsourcing (BPO) is the contracting of non-primary business activities and functions to a third-party provider.”
according to Techopedia
Business process outsourcing, as a concept, is rooted in manufacturing, where businesses frequently use other companies as contractors to handle certain tasks and activities as parts of their supply chain. Today, BPO is used more broadly to encompass many different processes. Ultimately, however, its core function is outsourcing business tasks to an external provider.
Business Process Outsourcing can play an important role in helping organisations accelerate digital transformation initiatives. By transferring operational and administrative tasks to specialist providers, businesses can free internal teams to focus on innovation, customer experience, and strategic growth.
BPO can support digital transformation through:
Businesses at all levels can utilise BPO, though it is not appropriate to automate all processes. Never automate a bad process. A good BPO provider will use their expertise and knowledge of best practices to improve processes as part of a BPO transition or a commitment to continual improvement. Processes that remain can be outsourced — especially tasks that are repetitive or that can be mapped and optimised in terms of flow, information or people. With the integration of Business Process Automation, your BPO transition can reach new levels of efficiency.
Take invoice management as an example. A mid-sized company may receive 5-10K invoices a month. Yet because the task of processing them follows the same replicable workflow, the process can be optimised with business process outsourcing.
A transition workflow could involve:
• Arranging for the ingestion of all invoices collected via email, physical mail, cloud sources or EDI to be sent to a central electronic system
• Scanning all invoices received to the box on a daily basis and utilising OCR to capture all header and line items
• Implementing technology that facilitates 2- or 3-way matching and then moves invoices through an approval workflow and into an ERP
Not only would such a process minimise the required human input into the process, it could potentially improve accuracy by removing the potential for human error.
One of the advantages of BPO is its flexibility. Businesses can outsource a wide range of operational, customer-facing, and administrative functions depending on their goals, resources, and growth requirements.
Commonly outsourced functions include:
The right outsourcing model depends on your operational needs, budget, and desired outcomes.
Organisations can engage BPO providers through several delivery models depending on operational requirements and governance needs.
Onsite BPO
External specialists work alongside internal teams at company locations.
Offsite BPO
Services are delivered remotely from the provider's facilities within the same country.
OffshoreBPO
Services are delivered from another country, providing access to broader talent pools and potential cost efficiencies.
Each model offers different advantages depending on business priorities, compliance requirements, and collaboration needs.
BPO can deliver a range of operational and strategic benefits, including:
While these benefits can vary between organisations, they are often among the primary reasons businesses choose to outsource operational functions.
Download and save the full guide to BPO here.
While outsourcing can provide substantial benefits, organisations should carefully evaluate potential challenges, including communication barriers, knowledge transfer requirements, compliance obligations, and service quality management.
The most successful outsourcing initiatives combine strong governance, clear performance expectations, and regular collaboration between internal teams and service providers.
Businesses often explore outsourcing when they experience:
While every organisation is different, recognising these indicators early can help leaders identify opportunities to improve efficiency and support growth.
Our approach involves collaborating with you to understand your business, pains and goals, thus helping to pinpoint your most pressing requirements, where the quick wins are as well as the longer strategic opportunities may lay. Working in a consultative approach we’ll develop a tailored solution to optimising, automating and transforming your business processes.
Whether your focus is on enhancing customer experience, streamlining operations, maintaining precision, leveraging business intelligence, or expanding your processes, we are here to help you establish a consistent workflow that meets your specific business needs, and helps transform your business
