Hallo! At The Right Software, we enjoy patronage of our Dutch benefactors. Dutch companies have a special place in our heart as we have learnt a lot about Dutch business practices as well as general culture and behavior. We find Dutch people intelligent, easy-going and thoroughly professional.

Dutch are business savvy people. Overcoming the disadvantage of being a smaller country in population and land area, businesses from Netherlands have created a name for themselves with hard work and strong ethics. Dutch Companies  such as Shell, Unilever, ING and Philips are household names all over the world now. Companies from Netherlands offer strong business ethics, dedicated, end-product oriented virtues to their customers.

At the same time, Dutch businessmen are calm, calculated bunch who are very much interested in what is best for their business. The time we have spend working as outsourcing partners has made us a better company in return bringing more value to our Dutch partners.

This article is an appreciation as well as a call-to-action to all Dutch companies to partner with The Right Software for their IT and general outsourcing needs.

What is Outsourcing?

According to Google, outsourcing is defined as,

… obtain (goods or a service) by contract from an outside supplier.

An IT company providing outsourcing to Netherlands is just like a vendor or a supplier such as government providing you with utilities at a cost. Its perfectly normal practice to hire vendors and suppliers for your work. IT outsourcing means to outsource your web and mobile development needs to third-party companies who are better suited to create and support the software while you focus on marketing and processes to provide better services to end clients.

… IT budget being spent on outsourcing rose from 10.6% in 2016 to 11.9% in 2017. [source]

Why Outsourcing is relevant?

Netherlands GDP growth rate in 2016 was 2.1% which shows steady increase and more money inflowing. Dutch being keen business people, would be opening new companies and hiring new staff in 2017 and 2018. This is a very good news but at the same time, there is a dearth of good IT resources in Netherlands. Being a small population and a highly skilled person required, the Dutch companies have to look elsewhere to meet the company’s IT demands. Similarly, Netherlands population trend is domanintely female (53%) than male (47%) which makes it a problem because IT is not seen (wrongly) as a viable job option by graduates and HBOs.

Similarly, steady wage growth in Netherlands shows that hiring local web developers and app developers will have more cost down the line in coming months and years and hiring will be inefficient.

These factors show that outsourcing is a viable option to Dutch companies and a venue they should explore.

Outsourcing benefits for Dutch companies

The benefits of outsourcing your IT with The Right Software are many fold. Some of them are written below.

• Cost effective: Of course the main reason most companies look out to outsourcing solutions is them cost effective. A typical experience PHP programmer will start from roughly €50-80 per hour or more. That is steep considering that most companies don’t need one such employee. The rate is even higher if you want to go with a technology or niche that not as well-trodden as PHP. The eastern European market programmers will cost around €30-50 per hour. On the other hand, a typical outsourced PHP programmer from The Right Software will cost you at €15-20 per hour while the fully experienced resource will come at €20-25 per hour. These are cost savings in the tune of ~ €25 to 30 thousand per year per resource. There are other hidden costs as well such as housing, training, insurance, parking and more. You will also save up to 27% of HR cost by outsourcing your requirements.
• Quality: What makes great engineers? Attention to details, great communication, bug-free delivery. Check, check and check. We take pride in our processes. We are methodical, we are thorough and we plan ahead. With The Right Software web and mobile teams, you will be in good hands. We provide a manager and a QA with each team and test everything through software before sending it forward.
• Similar timezones: We operate only 3 hours away from Dutch timezone. So if you hire from TRS, we’ll give you employees for your project that work 10am-7pm local time. That gives us only 2 hours headstart. Which is even better as it gives us a time to clear up schedule from last evening and be prepared to give you update when you come to office.
• Complete secrecy: In case of B2B partnerships, we don’t mention or market the work we take on on behalf of our Dutch partners and don’t contact the third party clients of our partners. We are able to work within frameworks allotted by our partners.
• Language proficiency: Dutch people are very good at English language, specially the younger generations. So it is not a big thing to communicate in English language. Further, our software are multi-lingual to keep in mind the target markets.
• Project management: We work with project management software including Jira, BaseCamp, Trello and BitBucket. These give us tremendous advantage as well as transparency of work when clients want to review the work updates in real-time.
• IT training and culture: Another issue that may seem small at the time of hiring one programmer for your company but will be a headache for later years. The issues related to IT culture and training for smaller organizations are,
  • Define clear job description
  • Provide orientation and problem statement
  • Correct filing and backup management
  • No quality audits
  • No managerial oversight
  • Lack of organizational IT policy
  • Inability to hire more people quickly
  • Diversity of technology available
  • Lack of Agile programming
• Fast turn-around: We deal with hiring programmers all day and for this, have strong set patterns and practices in place. We can set up a dedicated or project based team quickly for our Dutch partners. This is not easy if you are a company based on other non-IT sectors e.g. bookkeeping or marketing agency. We will set up project or time based teams for Dutch businesses in record time.
• Frequent work reports: We provide daily standup, skype updates, work reports in Excelsheets and emails to our Dutch partners everyday. Even when not asked, a status sheet is updated so that no problem at the end of month is created when work is verified.
• Proper invoicing: Work is always invoiced in PDF with company name and number mentioned clearly along with description so that no problem is received from tax authorities and filing returns.
• Friendly billing cycle: We service all kinds of companies for IT work. Irrespective of billing cycle, the programmer will work wholeheartedly on all work. Deferred billing is sometimes approved if client needs more time before payment.  The billing cycles are diverse based on mutual trust and work volume.
  • Weekly billing
  • Half upfront, half end of assignment
  • Hourly billing
  • Deferred billing
• Better than freelancing: We wrote a handy article on why IT company is better than freelancer. All points apply to engaging with an outsourcing partner.
• Support plan: We provide complete support and backup with written terms and SLAs so that Dutch client’s don’t have to chase us to get the work done. We’ll be eager to finish off and earn appreciation.

Things to consider?

Its important to know about the latest happenings in your industry, sector or vertical. These are the tidbits that are difficult for outsourcing companies to gauge. However, we’ll still provide you helpful information if we get from other sources but is pertinent to your growth.

Similarly, verify work at first opportunity so that later on there is no problem raised.

Clear job roles

Partnering with us, Dutch companies get clear job roles defined for them. Here are the things that each party will do. The Right Software will,

• Hire programmer(s)
• Setup backups and testing areas
• Provide web and app development services
• Test all work
• Create work reports
• Create invoices
• Provide helpful tips for growth and expansion

Whereas the Dutch companies will do the following tasks,

• Provide person of reference / manager
• Daily standup, meeting, work report
• Provide design and translations
• Provide business logic and explanations
• Verify all delivered software
• Confirm and approve invoices

With these clearly defined lines, we can work together in harmony for years to come.

Supported technologies, services and sectors

If you are a Dutch business who is working on their web and mobile concepts then we are the right partner for you. We are working with following sectors and verticals.

• Dutch marketing agencies: Provide us with designs and UI kits and we create CMS, Portals and mobile apps for them. This is a very popular model.
• Dutch accounting firms: We provide accounting services and file tax and reports for Dutch businesses.
• Dutch eCommerce stores: We work with WooCommerce, Magento and Lightspeed ecommerce development services. At the same time, we have created an-house solution for ecommerce using Laravel framework.
• Dutch sports agencies: If you want to create a sports coaching software such as portal and mobile app. Similarly, you can create food and exercise database and apps.
• Dutch professional service companies: We provide backend and support for other Dutch professional service companies and software companies.
• Others: We have Dutch clients in energy, travel, local listings and food industries. We create portals, automations and mobile apps for many Dutch businesses.

The services we provide are 360 engagement model.

• Online portals and CMSes
• CRMs and ERPs
• Software product update and upgrade
• Clean up hacked websites
• Business Intelligence (BI)
• Native Android, iOS Mobile Apps
• WordPress websites, themes and plugins
• Ecommerce with WooCommerce and Magento
• Web design
• SEO and digital marketing

How to start?

Our work model is very simple. Dutch clients send us an email or a call where they give an introduction about their organization and its requirement. Our business manager will then contact the Dutch business back over phone, Skype or email. We’ll discuss the requirement and come up with a written proposal. After proposal approval, contract and NDA, we’ll start work as part of your team.

The Right Software is a spirited web company that loves to create smart web and mobile app solutions. We love to meet you new people and learn their stories. We take pride in our software culture and values and some of them are:

• Goal Oriented.
• High-quality on product deliverables.
• Positive mindset.
• Multitask with parallel incidents.
• Team Player on Scrum meetings.
• English Communication.
• Shows empathy on Client’s Product.
• Being Proactive before a problem arises.

Counting with these values and qualities ensure that engaging a outsourcing model can be as successful as any local team with higher productivity than any offshore team due to timezone differences, faster collaboration, higher productivity and cultural affinity.

As an outsource team, we will work with you to implement infrastructures, develop products and code deployments. If you want to know more about how The Right Software can help you , contact us today with details and an introduction. We’ll be happy to give a free consultation.