There are many years since outsourcing has become a great solution for cutting costs. But even if it’s a great solution many companies avoided it as it was like a Russian roulette (especially for SMBs that do not have access to means of analyzing/validating/auditing their future partners).
In the last 2 years, the business environment got worse and the market more exigent. Outsourcing became, from what was once something to consider, a necessity for those who want to survive.
Why? Obviously, it lowers company costs and same time it offers more flexibility (no need to explain more as anyone should be familiar with the model… if not Google should provide some educated search results). You can even shut down an entire department for a while and save the money. You don’t need to worry about firing or hiring people, no worries about all the paper work or infrastructure costs.
Having all this said, what has Iasi to offer?
Even if you can virtually outsource any segment of your business here, the following three are definitely the ones to take advantage of:
Development
I worked many years with many developers, great people, constantly looking for better technologies, inventing new ones when needed, never giving up, always delivering. Extraordinary people doing extraordinary things.
Here you will find very good and reliable partners to help you with web and mobile development, building and maintaining complex database solutions, designing and building your next desktop product. Doesn’t matter if you are looking for C/C++, Java, C#, PHP or Pearl programmers, if you want to build for PC, Mac or mobile devices, in Iasi you will be able to find a partner that you can trust.
Support
The support department (or call center) can prove to be the most expensive one. What usually happens is this: the number of customers grows so the support department has to be scaled. But there isn’t a constant flow of customers and sometime (days or even weeks) nothing happens.
This is why you have to outsource it and it’s even easy to do. And Iasi is a great location for this. If you need technical skills (i.e. MSDST, MSCE) or written/spoken language skills (i.e. IELTS, Cambridge, DALF), the local companies will be able to help you. They can do this as Iasi, being such a big educational hub (for more info see: http://bit.ly/mMN3GH), can satisfy their request for such resources.
Design
Your product does not need a pretty UI, but one that is functional and ergonomic; you don’t need colorful box for your product… you need a box with a message that sells; you are not looking for a nice logo, but for a powerful brand that represents the very personality and beliefs of your company.
What I am trying to say is that making pretty drawings and pictures is easy… making one that will help your company sell more, is not an easy task.
Again, Iasi has what you are looking for. There are companies that will amaze you with their professionalism and quality. Personally, I had the chance to work with some of the great designers (artists… as they hate to be calledJ ) that are behind these companies.
Some of the world-wide brands, huge names that you encounter on daily basis, were created by these companies.
Here are some random names that are established in Iasi for some time and seem to do a great job:
XL World (http://www.xlworld.ro/)
“XL World is one of the leading and fastest-growing outsourcing companies in Eastern Europe...
The main areas of expertise are multi-lingual Contact Centre and BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) services. Support is offered in English and in more than 10 additional languages...”
“Welcome to Europe's number 1 independent IT group. With a successful heritage of 36 years of profitable, sustainable growth, SCC is well positioned to help you release immediate cost savings and get more for less out of your investment in IT infrastructure...”
FITS (http://www.fits.ro/)
“FITS is a mature software company that delivers custom made IT solutions for the financial sector, with a focus on banks and capital management companies. Our solutions are built with high flexibility to fit the customers’ needs, enabling them to optimize the costs with financial transactions...”
Grapefruit Design (http://www.grapefruit.ro)
“Grapefruit was founded in 1999 in Iasi as a small creative partnership by Marius Ursache, Stefan Liute and Laurian Gridinoc. We were the first in Romania to tell and do many things about corporate and brand identity, naming, brand manuals and web sites. To this day, we show the way, set trends and get followers, big and small.”
(Note: The brief information is as found on their own websites. This info might be out of context, so please browse them if you want to find out more.)
Is it cheap? Not cheap as Asian countries. The price varies by little comparing with Ukraine and Bulgaria. But you already cut costs by outsourcing... so, at this point, are you looking for Cheap or for Quality?!
Today would be a good day to start cutting your company costs.
Maybe you should consider adding localisation -- in Iasi, the personnel generally has a high degree of proficiency in European languages.
ReplyDeleteYes, you are right about it. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteIn Iasi, there are faculties where students intensively learn English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Greek, etc., so it's pretty easy to find recruits for multi-language support and content writing, localization.