Why Move Offshore to Nearshore?

Friday, January 27th, 2012 Steve Mezak

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If you are already outsourcing to such far flung locales as India, the Philippines, or Romania, you know that the time difference can make communicating with your vendor a bit tricky.  No one likes a 5am conference call!  If you have thought about moving your outsourcing to a vendor on the same side of the world as you are, this series on transitioning from offshore to nearshore is for you.

In this series, we will highlight the challenges and benefits of transitioning your outsourcing; first up we will cover the basics behind the transition.

Source: Wikipedia

With offshore outsourcing, there are numerous pros and cons.  Skilled labor at great prices that deliver your projects in a timely manner.  Then there is the aforementioned time difference and expensive travel that require a great deal of patience and planning.

Nearshore outsourcing provides 3 major benefits that will certainly make your life easier:

• Less oversight.  Moving more business nearshore enables you to reduce the coordination and management that is necessary with an offshore provider. Instead of dealing with time zones and communication barriers, you’ll be working with an organization that needs far fewer supervisory layers.
• Shorter travel time. Cutting down on the time for travel to visit your vendor, or for them to visit you, increases your productivity and the productivity of your entire outsourced software development team.
• Normal work hours.  With a nearshore vendor, you will eliminate the need for calls during off-hours, thereby removing a huge strain on your client teams.

If you don’t feel strongly enough to leave behind the relationships you have cultivated with your offshore vendors and move all of your outsourcing to nearshore sources, consider moving some of your projects. Making the choice to diversify providers and geographies by maintaining some business offshore and some business nearshore is a kind of transition that can mitigate a lot of the risk involved.

The bottom line is that transitioning from offshore to nearshore allows you to do more with the same resources and gives you stronger ability to respond to the market demands that drive your business—and isn’t that the point of outsourcing in the first place?

Next in this series is Part Two: Common Mistakes in Moving Offshore to Nearshore, in which we will outline a few aspects of the transition that you don’t want to overlook.