The past few years, ebPearls has experimented with several delivery models. The two models we have built and used most for our customers are ‘fixed price’ and ‘dedicated team’. And every day we are wondering: which of these two models delivers the highest value to our customers and makes offshoring work most effectively?

Fixed prices have one crucial pre-condition: it needs to be clear what exactly has to be built, when it is not, the estimate of the workload will be completely wrong. And more often than, people are wrong about the workload. As with building houses, I have never seen a house being delivered in time and according to plan. Web/software suppliers ‘protect’ their profit margins against wrong estimates by adding a big margin in the hours and in the hourly rate. The result is higher pricing and a lot of energy spent on the question ‘how much will the project cost’ and ‘what can be charged as extra work’.

Now the primary ‘problem’ that companies are solving by outsourcing their IT is ‘capacity’. They need people to run their IT-operations (be it a system, an application or a website). There are several options to run your IT:

- Hire IT staff on your payroll
- Outsource the IT operations to an external company
- Hire freelance IT persons
- Hire temporary people from an external employment agency

From the experience at ebPearls, I believe the strongest model for running IT operations is having your ‘own’ dedicated people, operating in a team where the team members know each other and have a strong team spirit. To build that team, hiring people on your payroll may seem cost-effective and easy. Apart from the fact that often it is not as cost-effective as it seems (overhead, illness, holidays, etc), your company becomes less flexible (hire/fire) and internalizes a skill that is often not the core business.

Another option is hiring external experts. This ensures flexibility and ability to hire the right skills for the right job. But the costs are substantial if you hire these experts locally. Besides, it is usually not possible to hire local dedicated teams. The local outsourcing relationship is by default customer-supplier, because hiring a full time dedicated team from a local supplier will incur high costs without any advantage over internal staff.

In an offshore situation, companies are able to create a situation where they are able to hire dedicated teams while keeping costs below or at the same level as hiring staff internally. The outsourcer can select the team members, train them and build a strong team that can work for the company for the long term. The bottom line in this way of organizing is that the outsourcer is always flexible in his capacity and has no long term employment engagements.

Having a dedicated team has a few advantages over making fixed price arrangements:

The need for 100% clear specifications disappears (because the requirements can be developed partly onshore and offshore + projects can be organized using agile methodologies).
- There are no disputes about the workload needed to complete a project
- Strong relations are developed between the internal staff and the offshore team
- The model is more cost effective (the supplier doesn’t need to add a ‘security markup’)
- The outsourcer has full control over planning
- There are no communication layers, all communication is straight between the outsourcer and his team (in fixed arrangements, several layers of project management are often needed)
- Knowledge can be kept with the outsourcer (his team will keep the knowledge, whereas in fixed arrangements, team members will often be replaced to other projects)

In the past, ebPearls has always offered the dedicated team model. Because we truly believe this is the most effective delivery model in an offshore situation, we have recently started shorter-term contracts. Where we previously used a minimum duration of 3 months, we now make it possible to hire people for any period from 1 week. The response from our customers is very positive and after launching this initiative 2 weeks ago, we already embraced 3 new customers.

We hope to receive some feedback from readers on our considerations on our business model. Maybe you have a different view, suggestions for changes in our models or you agree with our considerations; please share it with us.

Also please visit our pricing model .

To hire a new employee is always a little bit challenging and it costs the employer a lot of effort to find the right person. Especially in Australia it is often hard to find good skilled programmers and designers that fulfill all expectations. Either they don’t have enough experiences in the needed technology or they are too expensive. So it is no wonder that more and more Web/Software Solution companies and public agencies are looking for partners that can support them and give them the chance to exceed their capacity.

ebPearls offers its customers a cooperation model which gives Australian companies the chance to hire one programmer, or a team of programmers from us. So these companies can increase their capacity with the insurance to have a professional and trustful IT company in the background of these programmers. And in the same time they can not only avoid the exhausting recruiting process, but also save money.

Maybe you wonder how this process of hiring a dedicated programmer or team looks like. I want to explain this with an example of a customer from Sydney who wanted to increase the capacity of his own programmer team and started working together with our PHP developers, Rameshwor and Ananta.

As in all recruiting processes, the first thing we did to find these two team members was to define the profile and skills that the wished candidates should have to fulfill the job role perfectly. But different to the normal process of recruiting, all following steps were done by ebPearls. We selected several CVs of candidates who would match perfectly to the customers’ expectations and would fit in the job role.

These candidates either already work for ebPearls, or we will search with the help of our long-term-partner recruiting agencies for more good people.

After we agreed on two profiles, we arranged an interview, or better said a meeting, in Skype. Involved in this meeting were not only he and the developers but also his project manager, the director of ebPearls. Thanks to all modern communication tools, we had an interview with five people at the same time. It was more a friendly talk to get to know each other better than a normal interview. This way it brought all involved people already closer to each other and the customer got a better idea if these persons really match his expectations. And he got a better feeling if they’ll fit in his team before he made the last decision. At the end of this talk all contract details were fixed and the contract was signed after a few days. It took the client by surprise how fast and easy it went; it was a good start for a friendly partnership.

Project Scoping

A different agency has different style of scoping documents. We are good at learning the different approach of presenting the project. We do a lot of emails and Skype/MSN chat to understand the business of the project with the Account Manager, CEO or Director.

Project Estimation

Once we are happy with the understanding of the project we provide the detail micro level time estimation for our clients. We keep the one task below 3 hours so the developers that spend on the time will be easily visualize for the account manager to check at the end.

Daily Reporting

We provide the 2 reports daily to our client so we all are in the same page. At the morning we provide the work plan what developer is going to work on the project and at the end of the day we provide the detailed report what has been done with the screen shots of the work.

This way the projects are tracked in daily basis and any curve that move over the line, we can fix it right away. Also we put the real time tracking system in the Mantis tools, so you check what happening online.

Quality Testing

We understand what’s you fear dealing with the Outsourcing companies like us. We understand

what does it meant by “Pixel perfect”
what does it meant by “Cross browser compatibility”
What does it meant by “Delivering what you have scoped”

Our testers test all our websites in IE 6/7/8. FF, Safari, Chrome at PC and Mac to make sure they are perfectly working in all browsers and Operating system.

Communication

We understand the importance of communication in outsourcing business. Our project managers, developers, directors, testers, they all are online in Email, MSN and Skype during the office hours. You will be served within 30 min in business time and within 6 hours in off business hours.

Disciple approached us to build their website to share their portfolio with their visitors and able to manage the portfolios based on the categories.

We suggested to Disciple to use the open source CMS system “ebpau”. We customized the ebpau to meet our client’s need where he can manage the categories as much as wants and add the portfolios to the categories. Also provide the easy filter system so the visitors can click on the categories to see the respective portfolios.

Please click here to visit website.

If you run a web design or creative advertising or marketing agency, you may face increasing demands from your clients who want to build the new website. And you must be overflow of your work and unmanageable due to increasing cost of in-house programmers, unreliability of freelancers and office expense.
ebPearls white label offshore website development services gives you access to a world of talent and greater range of creative and technology services available. Working with ebPearls can improve your revenue streams and dramatically increase your workload capacity and deadline adherence.
Our team of 40+ custom design and programming professionals are all Kathmandu, Nepal based, masterfully trained and ready to help. Our team Nepal are well trained by the experienced producers and CEO’s.

Why Us?

• English speaking dedicated staff.
• Flexible client involvement levels.
• 40+ professional web designers, developers and strategists on call.
• No retainer fees.
• 24 – 48 hr turnaround on project quotes.
• Complete confidentiality.
• Global client base.
• 600+ outsourced projects handled since 2005.
• Available on site with 24hr notice.

White Label offshore outsourcing Services currently include:

• Custom Web Application Development
• E-commerce Web Design
• Content Management Systems (CMS)
• Custom Web Design
• Flash Design and Development
• Graphic Design
• Website Maintenance
• Search Engine Optimization
• iPhone and Mobile Device Programming

Our team boasts seasoned expertise with PHP/mySQL, ASP, ASP.NET, Cold Fusion, XHTML/CSS, Flash/ActionScript XML, Java, JavaScript, SQL Server, C++, Photoshop, Flash MX, SMS, XML and WAP.

How It Works

• Customize your workflow and communications requirements with the ebPearls White Label offshore outsourcing team
• ebPeaarls guarantees hourly rates for one full year
• Rates guaranteed to be 60% below industry average.
• Get quotes & timelines confirmed within 72 hours
• An ebPearls Senior Project Manager is available to coordinate all day-to-day communications, asset handoff and review steps
• Simple billing with no Agency of Record (AOR) commitments

Getting Started
ebPearls Outsourcing are the services you need, on time, at a fair price.

Contact the ebPearls White Label offshore outsourcing team today to find out more about how working with ebPearls can help you reach your goals.

Contact us for a free no obligation consultation to see if this service fits your needs.

At ebPearls we specialize in the use of Open Source technology to deliver robust, powerful and cost efficient web solutions. Over the past 5 or so years, open source software has progressed from being perceived as alternative products, to one of the leading edge ways of producing quality applications. Large companies use open source products such as Magento, Joomla and OSCommerce to deliver incredibly powerful functionality.

ebPearls believes Open Source software is the way of the future, and has built particular expertise in the L.A.M.P framework (Linux Apache MySQL, PHP). ebPearls have build a large number of websites using the open source technologies. Below are the few technologies we are expertise with.