Author(s): Samson Mbanje*
During challenging times, businesses need to think critically about their core revenue-generation functions and look to streamline everything else. The outsourcing of manufacturing, services and other economic operations is a common occurrence in most industries and is a widespread phenomenon in modern businesses including the mobile telecommunications industry, although the trade-off of the impact of business process outsourcing (BPO) on the company operational performance is still inconclusive. Few studies have been conducted to empirically evaluate the impact of BPO on the operational performance of the moble telecommunication industry quantitatively in the developing countries.Researchers have suggested that BPO implication on company performance using quantitative evaluation is underexplored, in the infancy stage, and worthy of further study in the Southern African countries including South African mobile telecom operators.This research tries to redress the existing knowledge gap and the limited body of literature by proposing a cost and productivity (CP) BPO performance measuremet framework, to evaluate the impact of BPO in the mobile telecommunication industry using cost and productivity as the underpinning quantitative performance measurements.A structured closed-ended questionnaire was used to collect raw data from 210 employees.Descriptive and chi-square tests were conducted to establish the statistically significant relationship between business process outsourcing and the operational performance of mobile telecommunication.The results reflect a statistically significant relationship between the implementation of BPO and cost and productivity.The study recommended that before deciding on outsourcing, supply chain practitioners should consider using the developed cost and productivity framework, which will guide supply chain practitioners in deciding whether to insource or outsource.This research contributed to the body of knowledge by developing a cost and productivity framework that assisted the mobile telecommunications industry in evaluating the impact of BPO on operational performance using quantitative measures. Further research is needed in order to do comparison studies confirming lessons gained across industries on the impact of BPO on cost and productivity, as well as international studies.