Tech Unboxed
Stay ahead of the curve with BBD's Tech Unboxed, the podcast that unpacks the latest trends, innovations, and transformative digital solutions driving tomorrow's world.
Tech Unboxed
Beyond Offshore: Right-Shoring Explained
David from BBD explains the concept of ride-shoring, a strategic approach combining nearshoring, offshoring, and onsite resources to create optimal software development teams. This flexible partnership model focuses on finding the best quality people in the right locations to create customized solutions that balance costs, quality requirements, and regulatory needs.
• Ride-shoring originated in manufacturing as moving business operations to optimal locations for maximizing profits and lowering costs
• Quality issues in outsourcing typically arise when companies abdicate responsibility rather than forming true partnerships
• Successful partnerships require shared roadmaps and vision between companies and their technology vendors
• Three key considerations for team distribution: required on-site presence, data access regulations, and time zone alignment
• BBD operates in Portugal, UK, Netherlands, South Africa, and India, customizing team distribution based on client requirements
• South Africa's strong work ethic and "city of gold" heritage influences BBD's 40-year focus on delivery and client satisfaction
Stay tuned for more Tech Talks coming soon.
here we are, another tech unbox, unboxed by BBD, and today I've got with me David. I'm your host, koen, and I'm looking forward to this conversation. David, can you explain who you are and what you do? Hi, good afternoon.
Speaker 1:I'm David and I've been with BBD for a very, very long time. I have a few responsibilities. I have a geography responsibility for Portugal. I have some other responsibilities within the BBD business in Europe and I also have responsibilities for the scale-up that I'm involved in and I'm assisting them in scale.
Speaker 2:So that's kind of interesting because you have a lot of roles, a lot of responsibilities. But today we're going to talk a little bit about ride-shoring. Please explain to us what was the concept of ride-shoring.
Speaker 1:Ride-shoring is a term traditionally known in manufacturing. The process of moving parts of your business operation to the best location focuses on maximizing profits and lowering costs. If we look at it in software terms, it's a combination of nearshoring, offshoring and onsite. It's to bring the best quality people in the best locations and to make the best mix possible. So sometimes it's not straight nearshoring, it's not straight offshoring and it's not straight on-site, and we all know bringing people all back into the office on-site isn't always possible.
Speaker 2:right, right shoring is, let's call it, the right mix and can that something that be objectively measured, or is it the more subjective term that is, depending on the situation, which time it is right shoring for you as a company?
Speaker 1:some companies for example, in in europe, is gdpr bringing a team from india? While it might be lowering your cost, it won't serve your gdpr needs, your privacy needs. So sometimes you would need some of the team to be in india, some of the team to be in portugal. It all depends. So that's where the thing comes right. Sure, it's a process that you go through with the clients to understand what what's best for them.
Speaker 2:yeah, and one of the topics that a lot of people think about when they think about the term outsourcing and nearshoring and so on. It's around the whole idea about the fact that you lower down your quality for costs, so you sort of juggle between the two. But is this really true and how do you trade this off? The?
Speaker 1:lowering the cost. And the bad quality comes when you give all the responsibility over to an organization. But it's a partnership between two organizations. Two organizations are joining and working together. They both need to ensure the quality. So whilst the provider of the service has their list of measurements to quality, the organization also should. It's not abdicating responsibility from the organization, saying, well, I've sent it off to offshore, so it's going to be done, and when it comes back it's going to be great. That's how often projects go, really, really bad.
Speaker 2:Would you have some real examples for us as the listeners to share, maybe how that can actually be successful in reality In reality, teams work together and we put in processes, testing, for example.
Speaker 1:Testing has various things within testing, so we can do automation testing, manual testing. Quality also comes in the form of specification how good are the specifications, how good is the product design, how all of those things work together. You also don't have to augment your team just with developers or only with product design. It can be a mix and you can choose the best people from either your organization, the organization you're shoring or offshoring to. It's a various combination. You need to get the right fit. So if you put quality as the principle and you work around to achieve it, it almost sounds like a flexible engagement from both sides.
Speaker 2:It almost sounds like a flexible engagement from both sides.
Speaker 1:It is a flexible engagement. Things are changing all the time. We're all trying to understand, for example, the role of AI, and how is that going to change the development landscape? The new UX, the design, the content, marketing and software development is never changing. So what we decide to do today and how we set things up today, in a year's time might be completely different. You might end up in an organization that now they need to scale. So we need to bring on a whole bunch of new people.
Speaker 2:And how do you sort of safeguard that you're on the right track together and in the right stage? Because I think you rightly so say that you can move from some startup to scale up, but how do you know it's the right time to actually scale up?
Speaker 1:Every organization that decides to let's use the word outsource either their development, their UX or the testing. They have a roadmap. So they're looking six months, they're looking a year ahead. The best thing for that organization is to share that with their partner, with the vendor that they're trying to engage with, and make sure that that vendor also then buys into that vision. If you're just looking to let's use the word body shop, if you're just looking for a bunch of freelancers and you're just wanting to body shop and add some muscle to your organization, then things are going to fall apart. But if you bring someone on board and you show them the vision, this is what I want to build. This is where I want to be in six months' time you get that buy-in from the company engaging.
Speaker 2:But when we talk flexibility, it also comes hand-in-hand with availability. How do you then work out the availability part, and how does bbd play a role in this?
Speaker 1:I think that's one of the the hardest things about startups and scale lapses. At what point do I need to bring on people? If I bring them on too soon, I'll burn cash. If I bring them on too late, then I can't.
Speaker 2:I lost my opportunity.
Speaker 1:Correct, it's a two and a throw, it's between the two organizations. So, as BBD, we try to remain flexible. We have a lot of developers, a lot of UX people, we have capacity in five different locations and we have projects starting, we have projects ending, we have you know and we have people moving about. So, for example, a real example is I've worked at BBD and in BBD for a very long time I might know someone who is moving projects or becoming available and might be really, really well suited for the current project that I'm on. And if we're talking to that long-term vision, the roadmap, and I understand where the organization is going, look, I know, sort of in six months' time you mentioned you want to start building this. I know the right person. So let's start having those conversations, let's earmark those people, let's put them down as possible people we could bring on board. And that talks to the partnership and to the planning.
Speaker 2:So what you're saying is, david, you bring anticipation to the mix as well. So flexibility, availability and then anticipation, but how I mean you're for a long time, you know in Portugal. Is the European market different than, for example, your home base, south Africa? The market is different.
Speaker 1:in South Africa we're well established and we've been there for 40 years Wow and we understand the market very, very well. And in Europe, we've been here for five. What's not different is europeans are looking for the same delivery from their partners. Whether you're in south africa, whether we're in india, whether you're in europe, everyone's looking for the same amount of delivery, good delivery, and we're we're bringing that delivery, that culture, that that know-how for the last 40 years to europe, to our clients. We've had clients in europe for 50 years, but we haven't only over the last five years have we actually been actively in Europe with offices.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and today you got your boots on the ground. We mentioned Portugal, but what are the other places where you're also active as BBD?
Speaker 1:UK and Netherlands, and then India and South Africa. India if I'm not mistaken, for the past 10 or 11 years.
Speaker 2:I can imagine, if I'm a client and I'm sort of in that process of scaling, how can you help me to identify where I should actually take the best people, because you have multiple locations. But how would you then split? How would you choose which location is good for me?
Speaker 1:I'd say there's three things, the first one being is do you want some or all of the team on site in your office, or do you want them some of the time? Or do you want them some of the time, or do you want them every six months for a workshop where things are defined and a sort of a roadmap is built for the next six months? Or is it a fact that your organization is all over the globe so that doesn't really matter? Does data access apply? For example, if you have someone in a DevOps cloud role that is supporting your production, data production infrastructure and the client is in the UK, can you have someone outside of the UK access that data? If the answer is no, then even though as much as you really want to save costs, you won't be able to save costs and send it off to India, because then you're in breach of privacy. So, for example, if the flights are quick so from here to where I live in port, to Spain or to the UK or to the Netherlands, you could almost say once a month come in for two days. South Africa is an overnight flight, eight hours, same time zone. You might also want to say I have to support US business hours. If I support US business hours, having someone in India doesn't really work out.
Speaker 1:But, you might decide okay, I want to have two individuals in South Africa to cover the European time zone, and then I want two people from India to cover the Australian time zone, as an example, because they're quite close to australia.
Speaker 2:For me it's clear, it's it's almost like an architectural design that you have to make when you you make this sort of efforts. Now, what would really stroke me is that, um well, bbd is so long in business over 40 years which is amazing, but obviously that I think it's a, it's a very clear, unique selling point, if I may call it like this.
Speaker 1:South Africa is a country where you need to learn, you need to study, you need to really, really strive in order to succeed. So if you look at culturally, it's a really working economy. It's a really working economy. If you have to go back to the DNA of South Africa, specifically Johannesburg, it was the city of gold. It was founded because there was gold there and there was the gold rush, all of those things. It continues to still be. They call it the city of gold. So it is about working, it is about progress and that is within BBD as well. It is about delivery and working hard, making sure clients are happy and, obviously, learning in the process as an individual.
Speaker 2:David, thank you so much for sharing your insights around ride shoring. Thank you very much. Thank you very much also to the audience and please stay tuned because we're going to get more of these tech talks coming out soon.