What the terms Outsourcing, Offshoring, BPO and BPR actually mean?
1. What is Outsourcing?
Outsourcing, simply put, is what happens when a business subcontracts elements of its work to another business. This can be outsourcing a few hours per day of Administration, or it could be outsourcing an entire IT department (e.g. technical support function, software development, website hosting etc.)
2. What is Offshoring?
Offshoring is when outsourcing takes place in another country. If you are a UK based business, Agility would be an offshore outsourced provider.
3. What is BPO?
BPO stands for Business Process Outsourcing. While there are some technical differences, it is often used interchangeably as a shorthand term for ‘outsourcing’
4. What is BPR?
BPR stands for Business Process Reengineering. It is used to describe the analysing, redeveloping and improving of existing business processes. It might, for example, be used to describe the automation of a number of previously manual processes. Agility may conduct a form of BPR when we analyse your business goals and needs.
5. Nearshore vs Farshore?
Nearshore is simply offshoring to a country that is geographically close to your own country. It’s no surprise that Farshoring is offshoring to a country a long distance from home. Typically, nearshoring is used where there is a greater reliance on physical outsourcing, for example, in logistics/distribution.
Our Prices and Fees
1. What does it cost?
That depends entirely on what work you need help with. Our fees are based on the complexity of work required and the technical skills needed of the people delivering it. All services are based on hourly charging models to give you flexibility to scale up or down as your needs change. Charge out fees start at just £20 per hour with a minimum of 2 hours per week. We also charge a client onboarding fee of £975. There are no other fees. Remember, a fee can either be a cost or an investment. If there are significant benefits to something that you pay for, it is more of an investment than a cost.
2. Are there any other or hidden fees?
No. The only fees you pay are the onboarding fee and the hourly charge out rate.
3. Why do I have to pay an onboarding fee?
We charge an onboarding fee for several reasons. Firstly, we invest a lot of time and effort in understanding your business, its goals and needs. We then map several solutions and recommend the best option(s) to you. Depending on the complexity of your needs, this may amount to several FTE days’ work. We feel it’s fair to charge a (usually heavily discounted) fee for work that we do. We believe that everyone should be paid a fair rate for their work and that includes businesses. Secondly, in some (quite rare) cases, it may not be possible for us to directly provide a solution to your needs.
We may, for example, recommend that it would be more cost effective for you to use a free web-based technology platform rather than paying us. In that case, our fee would cover the consultancy work undertaken to analyse your business needs, research the solution and make a recommendation. Thirdly, if we need to recruit (for example, to backfill) to cover your hours, we may have to pay recruitment fees and purchase equipment such as a secure laptop for the new team member. Given that we offer a Watertight Guarantee that you can activate after just 1 month, if we had recruited, we may have incurred costs worth many thousands of pounds at that time.
4. What currency do I have to pay in?
Agility Outsourcing Limited is registered in the UK (Company Number 14477267). You pay in pound sterling (GBP) into our nominated UK bank account.
How it works
1. Who manages my people in the Philippines and how often will I speak to them?
Your team in the Philippines will be managed by a local Team Leader. In the UK, you will have access to a dedicated Account Manager. Both people will manage the end to end relationship between you and your UK based team on the one hand, and your allocated, outsourced Philippines team on the other. Depending on the complexity of the work being undertaken, you will have very little need to manage the team and will only get involved during regular, scheduled reviews to discuss performance targets and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). However, you are more than welcome to engage with your Philippines based team in the same way you do with your UK based team. Our culture is flexible enough to adapt to yours.
2. What time zone will people in the Philippines work in?
Our people in the Philippines will adapt to your needs. If you need someone to be online during UK working hours, we can provide that. If the work is more ‘batch processing’ then they can work during the UK night and you will wake up to freshly completed tasks. Trust us, this is a great feeling!
3. How do holidays, sickness or other absence work?
We respect and value our people in the Philippines to a very high degree. We conform to all local employment legislation and observe all cultural requirement such as bank holidays and state/religious holidays. However, our business is based around flexibility, and we have built a highly dynamic and flexible model. We allocate two people to every UK based client. The Primary worker will work on your account for most of the time. The allocated Secondary worker will work closely with the Primary to understand the work, your culture and goals/needs so that they can step in to seamlessly cover scheduled holidays, unscheduled sickness or other absence such as maternity/paternity leave.
How we ensure quality and minimize risks
1. How can people in the Philippines understand my business needs in the UK?
The Philippines has two official languages, Filipino (which is based on a standardised version of Tagalog) and English. As such, everyone who you will directly be engaging with is fluent in English. Equally, people who make it into our team have demonstrable knowledge, skills, experience and understanding of one or more business sectors and areas. They have received one to one training from our leadership team on how to ask appropriate, probing questions to help us (and in some cases, our clients) understand what needs to be done. At all times, your UK Account Manager will maintain oversight of your needs.
2. How do I know that your staff will work well with my business?
We are very selective in who joins our team and have a rigorous recruitment, induction, and engagement programme. All our people are recruited because of their values and behavioral skills as well as their technical competency. Our business is targeted at small to medium enterprises and we, ourselves are an SME. We understand what is needed to make a small teamwork and the culture in our ‘Agility Family’ reflects that. Consequently, our people, our processes and our culture is capable of flexing and scaling to adapt to both your changing needs and your culture. We didn’t pick the name Agility just because the domain was available…
3. What happens if I’m not happy with the performance and what is the Watertight Guarantee?
We will of course, do everything in our power to address performance issues before they arise. If that isn’t possible for some reason and we need to improve performance (and we’re all pragmatists here, that does happen occasionally), we will take appropriate measures. These may include management supervision of your team / account, retraining, allocating additional resources or in rare cases, replacing your employee entirely. If performance doesn’t improve and you want to leave us, then you simply activate our Watertight Guarantee, 30 days later our contractual obligations end completely, and we wish you well on your journey. It really is as simple as that.
How we ensure security
1. How can I trust that you will comply with data protection laws and that my client data is safe?
i. As a UK based company, we fully comply with UK data protection legislation such as the Data Protection Act and GDPR. Our teams in the Philippines will only access your data/systems through remote desktops and secure VPNs, accessing data hosted within the UK.
2. How about legal requirements?
Everything that we do fully complies with relevant legislation in both the UK and the Philippines. We learned long ago that the best shortcut to business success is to not take shortcuts. You, your data, and your clients are in safe hands.
Can’t see the role you need listed above? Get in touch with us!
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Client Relationship Managers
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