Stop Outsourcing Engineering & Product Design

Outsourcing can be good for companies. When a customer service is outsourced to India, or a factory production line is outsourced, it can save the business money and increase the bottom line.  Saving money for the company means shareholders will be happy which sadly is all that matters these days (instead of real innovation and helping the country’s economy as a whole).

On this post, I won’t bash companies on the fact that outsourcing takes jobs away from Americans and might cause some customer dissatisfaction. Let’s say if at the end of the day it produces more profit than loss for the company, do it.

One of my problems is when engineering businesses start outsourcing their software development group to China and India. The software development team in those countries is going to be speaking a different language, far away from the end users, disconnected with support engineers of the company, and have a completely different culture.  All of that translates into creating new features on the software that the customers might not really need or not fixing the ones that the customers actually do need.  The software developers don’t talk to the field engineers (because they are so far away from each other location wise)  to find out where the bugs and problems are when developing applications for customers.

When software development gets outsourced:

• It will take longer than it should for engineers to develop applications because the fixes they are looking for won’t be implemented.
• There will be more unhappy customers because they won’t see changes they need done as fast as they expect it.
• More field engineering hours have to go to customer sites to support a software bug that could be fixed if there was good communication between developers and engineers. More often than not this comes out of the company pocket as part of the support packages.
• Software developers don’t know the new hot features that customers need that could give the software that competitive edge it needs (before the competition does it). In competition timing is everything.

Put all of that together and see if it is worth the (small) saving that outsourcing a group of 20 software developers would have for the company. Does it really end up saving you money in long term?

Related posts:

1. Automation Field Engineering Jobs To Be Done
2. Should Engineering be Outsourced?
3. Field Service Engineer Job to be Done II