When Henry Ford attempted to produce the Model T at a rapid pace and with high quality, he ran into a problem. It was difficult to organize teams of specialized workers to assemble automobiles, and with so many workers needed to scale the process, it was highly inefficient. To make matters worse, late delivery of parts caused pile-ups of workers vying for space to work and delays in production.
The combination of technology and startup thinking can force us to challenge long-held, collective wisdom. It’s a reality in business today that we’ve seen before, in the bestselling novel-turned-movie Moneyball, a true story about the Oakland Athletics baseball team and its general manager, Billy Beane.
We often get asked how CloudFactory is different from crowdsourcing platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk (mTurk). Simply put, while CloudFactory provides access to a talented workforce, we’re not a pure crowdsourcing model, we provide an enterprise alternative to crowdsourcing that is built to handle critical business processes that need to be done right.
CloudFactory has announced a new offering that makes it easy and affordable for startups and fast-growing companies to automate and outsource routine, back-office work through an on-demand workforce.
Deep inside of many organizations lies digital work that is routine, repetitive and incredibly tedious...but also critically important. For some businesses, this work is core to their customer experience. Like a big tech company that relies on accurate data sets to fuel machine learning algorithms that create an insanely personal, relevant user experience, or a startup that relies on accurate and timely web data to keep their customers ahead of constantly changing trends.
Just about every business finds itself tasked with some form of routine, repetitive data work. As the amount of unstructured data rises exponentially, so does the need to manage and process that data in a way that creates value for businesses and customers alike. The size and complexity of these processes certainly varies. It might be as simple as transcribing audio from videos or as complex as processing thousands of daily inputs in near real-time. Regardless of the importance or complexity, this work simply needs to get done. One question remains...is this a DIY (Do it Yourself) or a DIFM (Do it For Me) process?
More data has been created in the last two years than all previous years of human history combined. Just take a second and think about that mind-blowing statistic!
This is data on spending habits, social interactions, device performance and much more. The vast majority of this information is collected by businesses and could be used to improve product offerings, leverage cost reductions, save time and help make better business decisions. Studies indicate that retailers who embrace big data can expect to outperform their competition by an incredible 60%.
An Era for Startups:
While success for startups is far from assured, resources are widely available and barriers to entry have never been lower. Whether that be access to capital through crowdfunding and VCs, distributed talent pools, or the proliferation of startup incubators, new businesses are forming at exponential rates (and not just in Silicon Valley!).
At CloudFactory we are exploring what it looks like to bring humanity back to the BPO world. Inherent to the BPO industry are people, nearly 5 million of them. Yet simply adding lots of people to the equation doesn’t imply success. Like Grandaddy might say, “Just cause you’re in the garage doesn’t make you a car”.