Offshore outsourcing - when to use?

Mass expanding market of programming business is worldwide reality. New technologies enable that it can easily function as a unit. Whether you need a simple web site or a complex information system you can be provided with professional service of high quality for lower price than it would cost at local. Usually, U.S. companies hire foreign programmers for labor-intensive programming projects, mostly because of the need to free up their staff for other priorities and to reduce costs significantly.

Outsourcing motives

In addition to main reasons mentioned above, there may be more, appropriate situations when the outsourcing is the right thing to choose:

• Lack of staff with specific technical skills - either because for not being able to hire them, or when you don’t actually need them on full-time basis.
• To stay focused on core competencies - you want to stay focused on core competencies and critical projects and outsource non critical items.
• To improve service - you have specific need to improve your business but don’t have enough time and money to realize it in local territory or you feel that your business stagnates, but don’t have concrete idea how to improve it while you see that your competitors are gaining the market-you can get a valuable advice from people who know how to deal with complex problems
• To acquire specialized skills - you know exactly what will improve your business but don’t know how to do it yourself, you can hire outsourcing companies with deep domain expertise.
• To meet uneven staffing demands - you want to increase or decrease staff size easily and in pace with business conditions i.e. to change fixed costs to variable.
• Reduce costs – by outsourcing to one of the world’s low labor cost regions like Eastern Europe, companies reduce their costs significantly. At the same time they take competitive advantage of Europe’s communication infrastructure, and social background with strong western culture affinities.

Offshore outsourcing challenges

It seems that the fear of projects being hampered by cultural and language barriers is the main reason why American companies hesitate to hire overseas collaborates.

How to overcome any discomfort clients may have while working with foreign companies? The client’s needs have to be assessed completely. They need to be reassured that the job will be completed satisfactorily.

Answers on these questions may lie in clean arrangement/contract terms for both sides, good communication lines to ensure timely completion, and previous positive experience dealing with specific company. This isn’t actually so hard to achieve when the outsourcing company has a history of successful developed products at the first place and a skilled local project manager with great deal of experience managing an offshore team. This way companies can make the most of expert talent abroad and complete projects in a more expedient manner.

Outsourcing to Eastern Europe countries

Eastern Europe countries still offer classical education in natural and technical sciences to its students. Broad basic knowledge and remarkable logic have to be outstanding recommendations for competent and inventive professionals. On the other hand we have new tendencies of producing instant programming experts with nice sounding titles – that is happening all over the world. There is an abundance of well-educated and highly- skilled workers in Eastern Europe countries. They have a better understanding of western culture, which make them closer in cultural affinity, comparing with India, for example. This may be the one of the main reasons why the US firms are driven to these locations.

 

Competitive advantages of Serbia

In order to understand advantages of the Serbian Outsourcing solutions, it is appropriate to mention

Strong math - our educational system is based on strong mathematical and logic background that Serbian programmers gain during their entire education,

English language- English language is mandatory through schooling in duration of at least eight years,

Internationally acknowledged IT skills -large number of software professionals, whose skills are among the best in the world,

Lower cost factor for software production services- Serbia is placed in a typical low cost environment, that is South East Europe,

Cultural affinity – placed in South Eastern Europe, people of Serbia have tendencies towards western rather then eastern culture.

Serbian brain output

Serbia is a homeland of many world famous scientists. Let us mention some of them.

Nikola Tesla – inventor electrical,

Milutin Milankovic - geophysicist, known for his theory of ice ages,

Mihajlo Pupin - inventor of the overload coil-which made long distance telephone calls possible,

Stevo Todorcevic - mathematician, teaching on many universities, such as Berkeley, currently in Canada, University of Toronto. Many Serbian lecturers teach on universities worldwide like him,

Miodrag Stojkovic – a researcher with the Institute of Human Genetics at the University of Newcastle, the first person in Europe to use cells from a cloned embryo to treat disease.

 

This article was written by Jelena Lucic.

 

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