Business Process Outsourcing - BPO

Business Process Outsourcing is outsourcing pieces of a business to a third party.

This occurs when a business decides it's cheaper, or maybe just more efficient, to send some work outside the business to be done by people not directly employed by the business itself.

For instance, a small medical practice may not want to hire a full-time transcriptionist (someone who types out what is being said) for their medical charts. Maybe they don't see enough patients to justify the salary of a full-time person. They can send those audio files to a transcription company and have them transcribe it for a fee. The work still gets done, just not in-house.