The past few months for Dell have been anything but “ordinary” as the company worked to stay focused in a market that offered plenty of distractions. At the recent DellWorld event, HfS took the opportunity to better understand the changes and impact that are taking place in particular in the Healthcare and Insurance BPO practice.
Two years ago Dell made the conscious decision to exit the horizontal BPO market, and build this business around outcome-generating, platform-based BPO with end-to-end transaction processing for Healthcare and Insurance. They’ve defined a number of ‘beginning to end’ processes that they manage in order to industrialize, automate, and then look for ways to identify new value from their work.
Dell’s heritage is in making it easy for the customer – the “build to order PC,” for example. The core message these days is to tap into that heritage for BPO, to take a look at how to use their own success in retail, marketing, and “build to order” to manage healthcare and insurance processes that put the customer at the center. They are also partnering with subject matter experts and startups to leverage broader industry expertise and ideas.
Dell has an opportunity, though, to craft consulting to outsourcing messaging and bring to life the business process capabilities and subject matter expertise that’s “hidden away” in the BPO unit. This will become especially critical in the healthcare and insurance industries where there is an increased rate of change and a continuing cry for both more innovation and more cost reduction. To their credit, Dell has a solid infrastructure in the platform-based BPO business, a clear mandate on customer orientation and innovation, and an opportunity to build the next level of growth in an extra-ordinary digitally-enabled world.
