The Artha Shastra Framework is a structured set of processes, methodologies, and tools to map client needs to service provider capabilities.

The Current State Review methodology is used to assess the breadth and depth of the processes in the outsourcing organization. Compared to the 'discovery' process in the conventional BPO approach, the Artha Shastra process cuts the time for the review by up to one-third.

Our primary input for the Current State Review is the company organization chart. There will be little or none of the extended face-to-meetings, interviews with key employees, and site visits common in the conventional BPO discoveries. We focus on the needs of the end-user and center our approach on a  library of best practices, functions, employee details, time-line and quality of services provided.

The Current State Review proceeds in six steps:

We study the functions performed by the employees and aggregate the people required for each function. This is where we record any function unique to the organization.

We discuss and clarify issues related to process off-shoring and associated risks. This includes recommending the timing for off-shoring processes and reengineering them if needed.

We build a consensus and prepare a transition plan based on the complexity of the processes and time required to train employees.

We build a business case by aggregating the resource requirements and transition costs, and factoring the off-shore pricing. This pricing activity is crucial and involves a detailed analysis leading to unit costing of each process.

Finally we provide a framework for reengineering the processes based on various metrics.

Business Value

We leverage the data collected from the study to improve the business performance. We analyze the data to segment customers, focus on new business areas, develop new products and increase operating margins. The use of refined economic tools such as options based pricing for arriving at a pricing model, and base pricing vs. case pricing to decide on fixed and variable costs are routinely used to make our recommendations objective, analytical, and transparent.