Skills and capabilities have been distributed widely around the world. Many businesses need to reduce costs by obtaining services from an outside location. Offshore outsourcing providers can often help to reduce costs, due to lower raw materials costs and average salary. However, there are potential risks that you need to be aware of when it comes to outsourcing capabilities in your company. Risks may arise due to geopolitical factors, perceived loss of control and missing deadlines. However, outsourcing can result in immense opportunities. When you start your foray into offshoring, it is important to make sure that you are able to yield benefits. Offshoring should introduce new factors such as time zone constraints, offshore management overheads and others.
It is important to make sure that your decision to outsource capability won’t degrade the overall quality. If your business is characterized with aggressive timelines, you should make sure that the offshore company is able to keep up. It is not a good thing if customers start to face consistent drop in quality. The maintainability of products and services should be well improved. When choosing the right outsource providers, you should make sure that it is based on practical experience. When choosing outsourcing providers, you should make sure that they understand your business requirements. There should also be a clear agreement that defines the code of quality. You also need to test products continuously to ensure that quality is consistent across all batches.
It is not a good idea to choose an offshore team if they seem to lack the knowledge. Different standards could also represent problems to your company. As an example, data entry system implemented in an offshore location could be difference compared to local areas. If possible, you may provide training to offshore team so they will become fully compliant to standards in your industry. It may be necessary to conduct interactive discussion with the offshore team, so real-time issues can be addressed immediately. You should be able to come up with highly effective solutions. You need to be aware of possible issues and hurdles during the development and production processes. But, it is even better if the offshore team is resourceful enough to create their own solutions based on the local conditions.
When working with an offshore team, you need to make sure that there is a mutually agreed code of quality. This is a crucial standard that you need to achieve. This is also essential if you regularly introduce new enhancements and features to improve your products. Without improvement, your product could become obsolete immediately. However, without a code of quality, your product will reach the “spaghetti state”, which is indicated by disorganized improvement. As an example, the offshore production team should support modular development and production. It means that enhancement on a single module will have no or minimal negative implication. There should be a way to define quality parameters. You need to agree on a set of tools that can help your production to become more organized.
