When you’re considering offshoring, you’re hiring a company to do some or all of the things that you would be doing in-house yourself. This means moving them to another part of the world – hence the term offshoring. Why would you want to do this? Perhaps you have other aspects of your business that you want to focus on. There are pros and cons to consider, though.
Pros
There are a lot of good things to think about when you’re offshoring. First of all, you’re not going to have to hire additional employees, which means you’re going to be saving money. When you’re looking at offshoring companies, ask them about their labor costs. Since it’s a very competitive business, they may try to offer you the best price. Be careful though — read reviews about these companies beforehand and make sure that they do quality work.
Do you have a very large project that needs to be done? You might not have the most qualified people on your in-house staff, but the outsourcing company might have people who are experts on what you’re doing. That way, you’ll be able to reap the benefits of their expertise.
When you’re using your own people, you’re going to be constrained by your staffing. There are only so many people that can come to an office and while remote work has made things easier, there’s still a budgetary issue to consider. Offshoring companies, on the other hand, will be able to scale their staff to exactly what you’ll need without costing you extra.
Cons
As with everything else in life, there are downsides to offshoring. The first minus is that you won’t have complete control over everything that’s going on with a project. That can be very disconcerting to those who like to have their hand in everything and keep tabs on what’s going on. If you’re like that, then you might want to consider staying in-house.
Communication can be a big problem. Your office might be in one time zone and the offshoring company might be in a completely different one that is many hours ahead or behind. That can make coordinating things very difficult, since you will need to plan ahead, and it can be difficult to have a last-second meeting if one party is either closed or asleep.
The time differences aren’t the only communication issue. There are also language problems, which might require a translator, and there could also be different work styles. The workers in one country might like to take an hour’s break at what some might see as the most inopportune times. All of these things should be worked out in advance.
Both companies need to be on the same page when it comes to quality concerns. It can be very bad if one of them is more lax about that than the other. This needs to be addressed when first setting up contracts.
Offshoring can work for a lot of companies. You just need to know what it’s all about before you start using it for your own business. Doing that due diligence can help you set yourself up for success.
