Mumbai (Maharashtra) [India], July 17: The outsourcing industry in India, and even around the globe, has been dominated by Hyderabad and Bangalore for a while now. Massive delivery centers are located here, which run 24/7 shifts and have service level agreements (SLA) that specify the amount of time (in minutes) that will have elapsed from when an SLA is created to the time that the Customer receives its product. The work is never-ending and operations are tightly controlled.
There is, however, a hidden statistic – a statistic that is not included in the SLA reports – that reflects the true impact of presenteeism and excessive coordination on productivity in a BPO. Each and every single working time block during a shift is missing anywhere from 15-25% of the load time. In other words, each time block that is logged as having been used to produce output has 15-25% of the load time missing from the system. These missing hours are in the system, and they have been paid for; they simply do not exist (like the credit card statement showing a late payment).
Most BPO and ITES sector operations leaders in South India have never seen the statistic described above; not because it isn’t valid or accurate, but because it has not been standard practice to apply the tools and processes necessary to surface it. Shift Supervisors are responsible for maintaining attendance records, while Quality Teams maintain Call Metrics, but there is no standard way for tracking productive utilization – hence it simply isn’t visible to them.
The cost of this gap easily exceeds millions of dollars, quarter after quarter but it does not occur at once; it is incurred slowly, steadily and consistently – in deliveries that do not meet quality standards, and in the difference between what a shift is capable of before the end of the hour, and what it can actually deliver before the end of the hour.
This is where Flowace comes into play. An AI-enabled productivity platform for capturing BPO activity, Flowace provides operations leaders with visibility. It has over 80,000 active users spread through over 30 different countries, and surfaces “real” shift level data. It exposes idle capacity as well as any potential billable leakage before it goes to the client’s invoice, thus allowing operations leadership the necessary data to take corrective action prior to service level agreement failures.
The situation in South Asia, and in particular South India, has become increasingly more serious. According to the latest Gallup Global Workplace report (2026), South Asia had the largest drop globally at 8% in engagement for Managers. This has a direct impact on BPO in South India, but is also poorly connected to disengaged floor supervisors. As a result of that disengagement, discipline within the workplace decreases, and workers take longer breaks and idle for longer. The difference between what was promised and what was delivered represents the true result of an organization’s performance vs. its potential.
Tarun R Kodnani,Co-Founder, Flowace, understands why operations leaders often struggle to avoid action. “Measurement is not Micromanagement. Data is a treasure trove of opportunity. It helps teams re-prioritize. If a company does not track where time is spent, the company will not be able to make adjustments to improve productivity,” he says, ” The ultimate goal is to give employees the information they need, enabling them to enhance their contributions and generate additional income at the same time.” This is an important distinction in a BPO environment. Team leaders often wish to use time tracking as a negative motivator; however, that is not the intent of tracking time. When a team working a shift can understand how they have spent their time, they can begin to focus on their areas of effort. If they can identify the coordination overhead that consumes their time, the team will have factual data to present to their customers as opposed to estimates. The team shifts from merely showing up at work to efficiently getting these tasks done.
His co-founder, Varun R Kodnani, has positioned this issue in the same way as dollars at stake: “In India, most Board Rooms are still viewing productivity of the labour force as a human resources issue – it is not… it is a problem of how you allocate your capital. Each disengaged hour is a rupee paid with no return on investment. If a company cannot calculate its utilised hours, they cannot tell you where their margins have reduced.”
The external pressure is that substantial players in the market structure have approached: Big players have entered in May 2026. Anthropic announced an enterprise JV backed by Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs; OpenAI will be starting a $4b services enterprise venture backed by TPG and Brookfield. Both companies are entering the same BPO service sector, which is what created Bangalore and Hyderabad in terms of the market. They will use a very lean operating model with smaller teams, outcome based payments and complete analytical visibility to every minute of work completed.
The BPO and ITES firms in South India already have the skills and resources they need to tackle this. However, what they don’t possess is the analytic visibility that their competitive companies have already achieved. Right now, the percentage of lost time (paid hours) in South India ranges from 15% to 25%, but this is not lost yet. This percentage represents the invisibility of these lost hours. Moving towards making them visible is where the recovery starts.
