Building an Enterprise Platform – Consider Outsource Product Development

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What is Outsourced Product Development?

Outsourcing is not a new way of doing business. Traditionally, outsourcing would mean bringing in specific skills to augment your IT team. Outsourcing Product Development (OPD) may seem conceptually similar to outsourcing the development of software applications but there are significant differences. Some of the great value adds when you engage with Independent Software Vendors (ISV) specializing in OPD are as follows: 

• Product Mindset – The product-centric mindset allows teams to focus on outcome over output.  Since products last a longer lifetime than regular IT Projects the right mindset ensures the product is much more responsive to change, is more creative, ensures faster time-to-market, and has elevated code quality. As a modern and challenging approach, the right product mindset allows the organization to attain product goals in a lean manner through critical thinking and creativity, all while delivering financial advantage to the business. 

• Technology Choice – ISV specializing in OPD have a wealth of knowledge about the technology trends and have a high level of maturity in repeating a successful and tested tech stack for the product development in scope. A product must be customizable, scalable, robust, well-architected, and must have a solid framework on which one can build new features. In the generic IT services business, it is enough if the functionality requirements of the application are met. The cost of ownership for software built with the OPD model is comparatively lesser than something built within the organization which is constrained by the resources pool available to the customer.  

• Product-market Fit – Your business wouldn’t want to spend money on incubating a product or idea that has no market and identifying this product-market fit can be a challenging task. ISV specializing in OPD understand the pain points faced by the customer and can augment the product to create value for end customers. Finding out what products needs to be built and heading in the right direction from the inception reduce project costs and ensures the product satisfies the given space within the market. Leveraging the experience gained in other product development engagements is a great value add for your team and business. 

• Product Development Team –   The resource pool at your behest is a vital aspect of the quality of the delivery for the organization. If you are building a strategic product for your company you would need to see how it meets the attributes of flexibility, performance, scalability, robustness, customizability, reliability, and architecture standards. The engineers need to have much higher level of skills as against someone building an application for the current business needs, without accounting for the future growth of the organization. An ideal OPD partner should share a product culture aligned with the core culture of your organization where team members take ownership of a project to ensure a successful partnership.

With outsourcing,

1. You can create the perfect balance between the team’s development skills and the cost.  
2. The geographic reach of your outsourcing options is very competitive, with India among the best-known software talents.  
3. Business Analysts, Product Managers, UI/UX designers, DevOps Engineers, and others facilitate the creation of higher quality products and transform your business. To thrive in any market, would be impossible without their contribution. 
4. Your project may require highly specialized skills, such as Data Scientist. Finding such a broad range of experts may take quite some time. The time that could otherwise be spent doing the actual work on your project.  

Why Outsource Product Development?

The workforce of the future is a distributed workforce. Most of the information flow happens through the digital platform of the business. This could be the internal or external customers of the business. With the changing business, the need to have a robust platform that helps the company manage their business as well as scale with business becomes very critical to the success of the business. The companies are under immense pressure to periodically release new versions in a globally competitive market.  Engaging with ISV specializing in OPD should logically work as an extension of the customer IT (or Innovation or Commercials Tech) department. While the internal department works with stakeholders to understand their needs, the OPD teams can be leveraged to churn out the products required by the business. Engaging with OPD teams provides the business an opportunity to spin product teams best suited for the product development requirement of the business without the pain or worry about putting together an internal development team thereby significantly reducing the go-to-market time and at the same time leveraging the best-in-class team to build those products.  

Outsourcing is no longer purely about cutting costs and saving money. As today’s business environment gets more challenging, OPD has evolved as a method of reducing go-to-market time and gaining access to a highly qualified workforce, formerly limited to only larger companies. At the early project planning stage, the project manager can propose a team capable of delivering your project and identify the approximate time required from each team member. In the course of project development, the scope of the project may either grow or reduce, with resulting changes that need to be implemented. The OPD model gives you the flexibility to scale up and down without compromising on the quality of delivery. The OPD teams have this flexibility inbuilt into their business model and it works well for their customers. 

How about the quality? 

Mature OPD teams are comparable to some of the best software product companies in the world. Mostly driven by the tech, professional turned entrepreneurs with experience building world-class enterprise-grade products these companies have democratized the product development capabilities available to customers whose core business is not software development.  They have built a core competence of the product engineering cycle which is highly successful and repeatable, driving great value to the customers at a very competitive cost.  

Adtech Corp as Your Outsourcing Partner 

Adtech is an organization built by a team of people who have led world-class enterprise product development teams.  The leadership team consists of some of the best engineering heads with a combined experience of about 35+ years in shipping exceptional enterprise products at Oracle, Microsoft and Samsung.  We are now focused on helping customers succeed with our deep insight into enterprise products. We take pride in working with industry leaders to solve some of the biggest challenges in their business operations, employing state-of-the-art cross-platform Tech Stack solutions, IoT solutions, Deep Tech solutions, mobility solutions leveraging modern engineering practices.    

Adtech as an OPD company has delivered cutting-edge platforms across healthcare, supply chain, logistics, e-commerce, agritech, proptech & manufacturing.   

Case Study: 

A leading healthcare company has a platform that helps them to sell their product to clinics across the United States. This platform also helps the clinics to manage their complete inventory and gives them visibility of their stock in hand. They decided to outsource the product development to us and focus on their core business. The platform today partners with more than 5600 providers at 1400 locations across the US. It handles millions of patient appointments every day and integrates tens of EMRs solutions facilitating patient service to billing. 

When this assignment proved successful, the customer rapidly ramped up the team with the OPD team where most of them were operating at an offshore location to take advantage of the cost differentials. The OPD team and the customer team worked in a “co-development” model, sharing the development work that was required for every release. The platform has elevated patient experience through the continuity of care, streamlined inventory management, and improved staff productivity with an end-to-end paperless process.  

The long-term relationship with the OPD provider has existed for over 4 years now and has helped the customer continue to work together on future releases to enhance the core product functionality and build additional features that can open up new revenue streams,  release new features of their product, crash the product roadmap and include features earlier than planned, leading to faster customer acquisition, focus more on product management, as opposed to dealing with the overheads of managing a team and achieve higher R&D productivity for every development dollar spent.  

By truly enhancing patient experience, the platform has generated over $100 million in ancillary revenue for its customers in 2016 and has delivered a 100% Medicare Success rate in 2018. The platform today is a market leader in helping practices reduce costs and improve operational efficiency by providing their customers flexibility, security, bi-directional integration, ERP connectivity, and much more.