Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) is a subset of outsourcing that involves hiring the operations and responsibilities of a specific business process to a third party service provider. Originally, this was associated with manufacturing companies, such as Coca-Cola that outsourced large segments of its supply chain. BPO typically ranks in back office outsourcing, which includes internal business functions such as human resources or finance and accounting, and front office outsourcing, which includes customer related services such as contact center services.
BPO that is hired outside the country of a company is called offshore outsourcing. BPO that is contracted to a neighbor country of the company (or nearby) is called nearshore outsourcing. Often, business processes are based on information technology, and are called ITES-BPO, where ITES stands for Information Technology Service. Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO) and Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO) are some of the sub-segments of the business process outsourcing industry.