A Qualitative Examination of Pharmaceutical Business Service Outsourcing to the Middle East - Report Example

The central problem explored in this dissertation involves the potential importance of the Middle Eastern region as an offshore outsourcing destination for pharmaceutical industry BPO. Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), in which businesses assign designated functions to external service providers, has become an important operating model that facilitates the organization, streamlining and focus of businesses to achieve maximal profitability in the context of optimal productivity (Brown & Wilson, 2008).

Business areas that are most frequently outsourced include a vast group of services including payroll, employees’ benefits management, human resources, financial and accounting services and claims processing. Global pharmaceutical companies have increasingly looked to BPO as a model for streamlining their operations and as a way to devote maximal internal resources to their core functions involving the development of new pharmaceutical agents (Brown & Wilson, 2008). The pharmaceutical industry is uniquely positioned to engage in BPO, as its market has become increasingly global and as the size of many pharmaceutical companies requires efficient and streamlined organizational plans to facilitate optimal business management practices (Chakrabarty, 2008).

Global pharmaceutical companies currently engage in the above cited areas of BPO, and increasingly have begun to pursue outsourcing of core areas of research and development to smaller companies with highly specialized capabilities (Chakrabarty, 2008).