With the advent of innovative technologies, businesses operating in the hospitality industry face the need to modify a lot of their business processes and strategies. Electronic point of sale systems (EPOS) , customer relationship management (CRM) software, smart appliances and many other solutions are revolutionizing the industry by offering completely new ways of customer engagement and business management. More than ever, hospitality companies feel the need to accelerate their digital transformation in order to gain the competitive edge. With this in mind, they start looking for ways to modernize their IT systems and scale their software development teams. In many cases, they opt for developing hospitality software offshore to save valuable time and reduce costs associated with in-house development. Providing software development services to enterprise-level businesses in hospitality, we are well aware of the reasons why these companies outsource, the challenges they have and the benefits they derive from it. In this article, we are going to share our own experience to help you weigh up all the pros and cons of outsourcing hospitality software development.
Client’s background
HotSchedules, a US-based enterprise level company, provides cloud-based solutions for the hospitality industry. The main idea of the company is to help restaurants work smarter through the use of technology. Their solutions are designed to automate various operational challenges such as recruiting, scheduling, training, business intelligence, shift communication, labor and inventory management. The company has over 2 million active users in over 110,000 locations across 26 countries and is considered one of the biggest US companies operating in the hospitality industry.
Why businesses in hospitality need to outsource
Finding qualified resources in-house is a big challenge since many established enterprises are aimed at finding a team ready to support their legacy systems on a long-term basis. For instance, HotSchedules was looking for a professional development team who would be able to support and optimize their product without spending too much time and money on in-house staffing. The company has been successfully functioning for over a decade, being one of the most beloved and trusted labor management solutions inside the US and providing its services to a myriad of restaurants and fast-food networks. However, with time HotSchedules faced the need to modernize their technological infrastructure. Thus, to maintain the competitive edge and access a large talent pool, the company chose outsourcing as the best option for optimizing their existing solutions.
Previous experience of software development outsourcing
Nowadays there’s a big choice of outsourcing destinations and software development providers. The success of your projects greatly depends on the relationship you manage to develop with your vendor. That is why it’s extremely important to consider a number of factors such as cultural proximity, reliable cooperation models, availability of expertise etc. when choosing an outsourcing vendor.
Moreover, constant staff turnover may act as a barrier between the customer and the outsourcing team as well. When the offshore team is not involved into the technicalities of the product and is not interested in developing domain knowledge, the quality of the product may be significantly affected. So when you consider offshore providers, you should choose those companies who are well-informed about the industry and interested in promoting and improving your product on a long-term basis. As a result, you will have a team of dedicated specialists who are ready to support and maintain your legacy system.
The importance of keeping domain knowledge
When large corporations seek an offshore partner, they usually consider vendors that have an in-depth understanding of their business and industry overall. The development of great solutions is impossible without understanding its value for the users and without knowing the technicalities of the enterprise level business. Therefore, companies should look for a provider that will be able to allocate a dedicated team for a long-term partnership. Such team will commit to the project, develop the domain knowledge and apply it for the good of the project. So cooperation with a dedicated team who has prior domain expertise may greatly leverage your business and help in recognizing unmet needs in the market.
How outsourcing resolves challenges with staff retention
Employee retention in today’s business world is essential to the success of any enterprise organisation. The problem rests in finding and holding on to the right people, which may be difficult since the competition in the US is high. Many skilled developers already work for dynamic and challenging startups or big tech corporations. Attracting such specialists may be really difficult since many of them are interested in building everything from scratch rather than improving existing functionalities. That is why enterprise level companies seek developers who are interested in long-term cooperation and are not afraid of challenges associated with modernizing and improving the legacy system. Finding and retaining such specialists offshore is much easier and faster.
Modernizing a well-established hospitality solution
Even the most well-established companies should keep up with the latest updates on the technological market to stay competitive. That is why our dedicated development team worked on HotSchedules legacy system transformation moving it from JSP to REST + Backbone + Marionette. Moreover, our engineers were involved not only in maintenance and modernization of the legacy product but also in the development of an innovative solution for employee scheduling- HotSchedules Scheduler. This is a comprehensive workforce management solution with advanced reporting and forecasting capabilities that helps restaurants schedule people at the right time thus reducing labor costs. With the help of this app, employees may easily view their schedule, swap shifts, enter time-off requests, and communicate with each other via instant messages. So modernization of existing solutions results in significant enhancement of all business processes as well as saving of labor costs.
Wrap-up
All in all, a thorough consideration of all the above mentioned factors might help you arrive at the best decision for your business when choosing an IT outsourcing vendor. In such case, developing hospitality software offshore will benefit your business greatly by offering you high-quality and cost-effective services on a long-term basis. Innovative solutions may allow you to provide more efficient services to guests as well as optimize internal operations by turning challenges into opportunities.
