Tag: outsourcing

Outsourcing – the new trend

Many companies decide to outsource the ServiceNow development to other entities. The decision is dictated by the lack of in-house expertise or resources to handle the transition.

Nearshoring ServiceNow contractors are in the same time zone as your company, and they share a similar cultural background, which helps avoid misunderstandings. A high level of expertise, closeness, and good price-quality ratio are only some of the reasons why companies consider nearshoring more and more to introduce ServiceNow.

Nearshoring advantages

No matter how good your internal IT team is, the specialized software development firms know the platform inside out. Their high-level technological skills, combined with business knowledge and fast implementation, guarantee a seamless experience and a smooth workflow behind. Nearshoring provides you with the best specialists in the part of the world you live in, close to you physically and from the cultural point of view. Thanks to the geographical proximity, you get high availability and on-time responses, minimizing the risk of delays and misunderstandings.

Contrary to the in-house teams that know your company’s ins and outs, the outsourced ServiceNow team doesn’t have that knowledge at the beginning. But its strength is their platform expertise that supports the in-house team in applying the ServiceNow solution. Hiring an external company and outsourcing their talents appear to be much more cost-effective, and spare you thinking about salaries, hardware and software costs, maintenance, and cloud services.

Doing it with the right neighboring countries allows you to choose the most economical option with the best quality, which in some cases matches or even beats the quality of onshore peers. What’s worth adding, if you decide to hire a vendor, they are also responsible for onboarding and training of ServiceNow specialists and they handle impediments following from employee rotation – whereas you and your teams focus on business.

Investing in ServiceNow nearshoring not only leverages a readily scalable solution but also expands and adjusts to your business needs as it grows. In this article you’ll find a comparison of compare nearshoring, onshoring, and offshoring.

Outsourcing formats

There are different ways to approach nearshoring. Based on our experience, we offer two approaches to our clients: team outsourcing and augmented staffing.

Team outsourcing

In team outsourcing, you get a fully dedicated team of developers, testers, analysts, SCRUM master, and/or Project Manager (PM). Our experts can work with you both remotely and onsite, depending on your needs and expectations. It is a perfect solution when you need a full project team permanently, with an end-to-end Now Platform delivery and execution. Our PM or SCRUM master is in charge, and his responsibility is to drive the agile delivery, provide forecasts and reports, managing the resources.

Augmented staffing

Choosing augmented staffing, you are in charge of the project management, whereas our specialists support you in the delivery process. You choose the specialization(s) in which we support your teams, and if they join your project onsite or remotely, full-time, part-time, and for how long you need our support. Augmented staffing is a perfect choice when you need one or a couple of specialists to reinforce your in-house team who handle system architecture, quality assurance, and/or testing.

What our customers say

There is no better way to understand if ServiceNow nearshoring is right for you than through the experience of other companies. After interviews with our customers, we spotted the reasons behind their choice of a nearshoring company, like ours. As a result, we have learned that they valued the most:

• Seamless internal team extension,
• Engaged/committed team members,
• Professionalism, proactivity, efficiency,
• Partnership,
• Clear cooperation rules,
• Efficient communication and addressing needs,
• Positive attitude,
• Optimal combination of cost, capability, and size.

81 % of our customers admitted that they have been searching for ServiceNow nearshoring services to grow and enable their internal teams to focus on more creative tasks. More than half told us that they treat the ServiceNow partner not as a development house, but as a transformation enabler.

First-hand testimonials

Having worked for such a long time, since the very beginning we’ve been building personal relations based on trust and common understanding with every person from the SPOC team. You’re not vendors/suppliers – you’re an invaluable extension of our team.

Waste, water & energy management company

Absolute professionalism, competence, knowledge – I have no doubts that SPOC is a good and recommendable partner.

Global Talent Acquisition and Management company

Why have we chosen SPOC? We worked with other partners for IT helpdesk staff, and we wanted to enhance IT and expand outside into other non-IT areas. We wanted to increase the development team and find more long-term partners to secure ServiceNow developments and boost our resilience to external factors.

Global Management Consulting company

If you want to know more, we are happy to help as your potential ServiceNow partner and advisor. Drop us a line.

Introduction

Hiring a party outside the company has become a great commodity in recent years for many organizations. The three types of outsourcing – onshoring, offshoring, and nearshoring differ from each other. Why is the last one gaining on popularity?

Onshoring and offshoring – a tough choice

Cost-cutting and lack of experts are the most common reasons behind outsourcing. Staying competitive and keeping growth many times means choosing the most economical way of providing services. When you decide to give certain job functions outside your company, you can do it by choosing between companies that operate in the same country as you (onshoring), overseas (offshoring), or in a relatively close country (nearshoring). The choice not only differs in your service provider’s location, as it has more consequences in terms of the possible outcomes.

While onshoring might seem the most attractive choice due to the same cultural background, time zone, and language, the actual savings are usually the lowest. The advantageous position lays in quick responsiveness to market disruptions. Onshoring is a suitable choice for companies based in the big metropolises.

On the opposite pole, offshoring appears as the most cost-saving solution as it takes advantage of cost differentials between countries. Still, it is suitable mostly for less complex services or those requiring minimal collaboration. The downside of deciding to follow this type of outsourcing is the quality, impediments following from time zone differences, cultural incompatibility, and, in some cases, poor infrastructure.

Nearshoring, the golden mean?

Onshoring and offshoring are two extremes, and it is hard to find a balance between high quality and low cost. For that reason, nearshoring seems the right outsourcing choice. According to Hoffmann, Bove, and Rauser, this year, we will witness changes in the outsourcing job market, focusing mostly on nearshoring. Geographical neighborhood carries several advantages. Not having to cope with the time zone differences or cultural discrepancies is a big yes for many companies.

In the pre-pandemic times, nearshoring had another advantage: being close enough to travel so that the team integration could go perfectly. It is less of an option due to travel restrictions right now, but the online meetings can be still held during regular office hours, which is hard to obtain in offshoring. More than that, nearshoring means a similar expertise level which, as a consequence, provides you with knowledgeable and independent consultants. It saves your company a lot of time on, e.g., guidance.

All of it, keeping a high quality of delivery, with increased flexibility that allows you to choose the most suitable setup for your company. You save time and energy, keeping it cost-efficient.

Is nearshoring the right choice for you?

It depends on your needs, the technical capability of your teams, and business priorities. Only you can decide the right way of outsourcing for your company, but you should consider all the advantages of having a workforce that is close to you, as in nearshoring. Most importantly, it would be best if you focused on the outcomes you want to achieve. Nearshoring might be a perfect choice if you are searching for experts specialized in digitization or automation. Having them close to your home will make the work more convenient while keeping the rates reasonable.

To make sure it is the right choice for you, respond to the following questions:

1. Do you need to extend the in-house team or to form a new team?
2. Are you searching for subject matter experts?
3. Have you defined your goals to achieve?
4. Do you need remote workers with real-time availability?
5. Are you focused on quality consistency?
6. Do you want to cut down costs and time spent on hiring?

If you responded “yes” to most of the questions, nearshoring should work like a charm for you. If you are interested in the ServiceNow nearshoring, do not hesitate to contact us. Our teams in Poland have been working in nearshoring since 2010, providing our clients with expertise, dedicated teams, and more – you can check the details here.

Questions? Reach out to us.