Offshoring - a chance of globalisation

Offshoring - significant chances, but also some risks

Globalisation and new technologies have a fundamental impact on our work environment. If one understands the background and particularities, it offers tremendous advantages for one's business. To leverage on those for one's own value add and at the same time avoid the risks is the major task. Exactly that is the value proposition of SERES.

Oversimplified "offshoring" is about leveraging on countries with significantly lower wages for procurement of SW-services or the processing of business processes in order to reduce the own overall costs.

A realistic analysis of the cost advantages to be obtained by deployment of highly qualified, low cost people from foreign countries leads to savings potentials of 20 to up to 40 %.

Suitable countries / regions

At first glance, there are several countries and regions suitable for offshoring. After a profound analysis based on well defined criteria

• complexity of task, necessary process expertise, need of communication
• standard of education and availability / scalability of qualified resources
• wage level and the future stability
• cultural differences, language barriers, time difference
• quality and reliability of infrastructure
• political stability

nearly every independent study declares India - for now and the near future - as the country with most benefits. In some cases, however, Russia might also be an interesting alternative.

Suitable tasks / processes

One of the first task to be shifted were simple business processes such as data entry, the drawing of slides according inputs or the coding of SW according well described specifications. Especially in case of large corporations, enough positive examples of successful offshoring projects are available, rangig from SW development, applications management to the handling of large volumes of complex business processes.

In general, suitable tasks are:

• Design, development, test and maintenance of software
• Simple business processes with high demand of manual labour
• Transaction oriented business processes with a major dependency on the supporting IT infrastructure

Critical success factors

The chances are huge, but there are also risks involved. Exactly at this point, SERES provides its value add. We offer you

• Effective project management and controlling
• In depth understanding of both cultures - at customers and at suppliers side
• Long standing experience and expertise concerning implementation of corresponding tasks

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