Time to consider another solution to meet the demand for staff and to look further afield, beyond national boundaries. Not "Made in China" or another far-flung country, such as India, but closer to home. Also known as "nearshoring". Belgium and other West European countries do this by looking mainly to Eastern and Southern Europe. These countries offer similar benefits to offshore countries in another continent – lower wage costs, for example - but with less of a gap between the cultures, time-zones and sheer distance. Involving foreign workers from these countries provides a good value and high-quality influx of IT skills. Countries such as Poland and Portugal have earned their place, including in the Realdolmen DevOps Factory. We provide a number of benefits for you, in an organized way.
Let's hear from Roel De Cuyper, Realdolmen devOps Factory manager.
Flexible pool of talents
Nowadays it is important to be able to adjust rapidly to change. To do so requires resources. We provide these resources, starting with our own people, but as the availability of well-qualified employees is not unlimited, we are looking at alternatives. One of the alternatives is our structural nearshoring in Poland and Portugal. These countries have flexible labor markets, with highly-trained, motivated - but affordable - ICT people. This is the ideal way to increase our own company's capacity. We are talking here about a variety of resources and profiles, such as software development in .net and Java, solution knowledge of Salesforce.com, MS Dynamics and MS SharePoint, and 24/7 remote support. But our focus is not so much on delivering manpower as such, but on being able to offer working solutions to our customers in their businesses. We work in an "extended team" mode, and stimulate hybrid teams who can interact with each other to deliver the added value that we are looking for.
Cost considerations
Alongside flexibility, the cost aspect is, for many companies, a serious argument for outsourcing ICT abroad. So it true that nearshoring also provides cost reductions, especially in terms of salary. That is not only beneficial to us, but also to our customers. But we need to put the cost argument into perspective, because other factors come into play when working remotely and need some extra attention. Correct project management is an important precondition if you want to make nearshoring successful. Working remotely also places heavy demands on collaboration and communication. We deploy the latest tools, so that all team members are able to have permanently live connections to each other. Involvement and integration are indeed important foundations for nearshoring. This means that we can virtually go to each other's desks to ask a question or discuss something. This minimizes the impact of the physical distance, although there are also regular in-person visits between the nearshore locations.
Little difference in culture, time-zones and distance
Outsourcing to Asian countries is probably cheaper than outsourcing within Europe, but in our case the near absence of time-zone differences is an important benefit of nearshoring. The overlapping working hours make it easier to communicate and to organize the work. Communication problems due to large time differences, for example, do not occur. And the limited cultural differences and the relatively short distances also play a role. The fact that Poland and Portugal are EU countries brings an additional benefit at the legislative level. European privacy rules also apply there. This uniformity is definitely not a minor factor for certain projects with sensitive information.
Taking over recruitment and selection
We are noticing that companies are finding it difficult to attract in-house people with the right profiles themselves. Think, for example, of .net or Java skills. Thanks to our hybrid teams, we have enough critical mass and companies no longer have to go through the recruitment and selection process themselves before getting started on an actual project. They can focus on their business needs and our Realdolmen DevOps Factory helps them to complete their project in an alternative, though organized, manner.
It's your choice
The importance of nearshoring is growing, but we are aware that not every company is open to the benefits of nearshoring. If a company, for whatever reason, does not want to make use of overseas specialists, then we will keep the project entirely in local hands. We always leave the final choice to the customer and guarantee transparency.
If you want to realize a certain idea, or if you would like more information on the Realdolmen DevOps Factory, do not hesitate to contact Realdolmen DevOps Factory Manager Roel De Cuyper at roel.decuyper@realdolmen.com.
To find out more about Realdolmen DevOps Factory, read the blogposts published previously:
Reducing your time-to-market: R Project (DevOps) Factory, your ideas incubator
From C-level digital (il)literacy to digital maturity
Cooperation that really works
A software factory's on-board instruments explained
How much does your company lose due to unused software each year?