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Do You Think That Business Process Outsourcing Would Have Improved Wal-Mart’s Profits? Justify Your Answer.

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Question 3
Do you think that Business Process Outsourcing would have improved Wal-Mart’s profits? Justify your answer.

Introduction:
Nowadays, outsourcing firms are emerging like mushrooms across the globe. Outsourcing is a journey of two organisations seeking jointly to overcome predictable challenges (Nakkiran S John; Franklin D, 2005). BPO stands for ‘Business Process Outsourcing’ which is the process through which one company hands over part of its work to another company, making it responsible for the design and implementation of the business process under strict guidelines regarding requirements and specifications from the outsourcing company (Destination India, 2009). Today anything that can be outsourced gets outsourced and BPO can include the following key functions: administration, finance and accounting, human resources, payment services, sales, marketing and customer care, supply chain management and software development among others. Almost every developing country in the world today has its Business Process Outsourcing companies that not only accommodate the outsourcing needs of the local industry but astonishingly offer business processing services to other foreign countries as well.
Wal-Mart is one of the largest companies in America and its reputation is based on its strategies to minimize operating costs and maintain low prices which attract most of its customers. In today’s challenging business environment, many companies are looking for ways to restructure business processes. As such, it is mentioned in the case study that Wal-Mart’s IT department was working on 2500 business-technology projects, including the bulk the RFID work mainly done by in-house programmers and software - with no outsourcing. As outsourcing is widely seen as a key business strategy and is increasingly being used in IT, Wal-Mart can choose to opt for business

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