Specialist software company MIP has introduced an international outsourcing team. With Covid-19 pushing the boundaries of digital innovation, MIP has found its digital stack to be a prime solution for companies wanting to bridge the gap between securing legacy business administration systems and exposing them to the digital world of real-time consumer interaction.
MIP’s first international outsourced customer is a large software and application development organisation in Canada.
Digitisation itself, and working remotely, enabled MIP to look further than the local market to drive its software engineering capability. The key to MIP’s strategy is that it does not only supply software engineering and allied skills to the global market, but it comes with software and solutions that address the needs to digitise a company’s infrastructure. MIP not only addresses the needs for building mobile apps for devices but addresses the need for the mobile device to act as a social tool between company and client.
The MIP digital stack has been designed to enable a socialised technology approach, allowing organisations to interact with their hyper-connected customers in real time, across any medium, through the integration of people, processes and systems.
“For years, we have been talking about South Africa’s benefits as an outsourced destination, and FDM4 immediately realised that a partnership of this nature could offer far more than just investing in software,” says Richard Firth, CEO of MIP Holdings. “Not only are we providing the tools to ensure that FDM4’s customers can respond better and faster to their own customers, we are providing years of specialist expertise in the financial services industry.”
He says that the Canadian organisation recognised that MIP’s offering would be more cost effective than trying to source their own and train their staff. “FDM4 has been using the most common outsourcing destinations for a number of years, including India, Mexico, and the Philippines. Using MIP was the first time they got exactly what they were looking for – a country that can speak English, understand their requirements, and deliver on those requirements. It was interesting that FDM4 really highlighted the advantage of MIP’s ability to communicate in English.”
He adds that South Africa is price competitive, language competitive, and competency competitive when it comes to outsourcing, and that many local companies are being very shortsighted by looking to other countries for their solutions. “Corporate South Africa is willing to pay more for international solutions and support because there is a perception that you get more from offshore solutions than local ones. In reality, that’s not the case at all.”
According to McKinsey, the South African BPO sector has been a strong performer historically. Over the next three years, the analysts expect it to continue to grow at around 3% per annum, in line with global growth rates in the BPO space. The overall South African BPO market is valued at $461-million, $272-million of which is attributed to traditional BPO, while BPaaS is valued at $188-million. Currently there are over 100 local and international BPO providers such as Teleperformance, EXL, WNS, and Webhelp operating in South Africa.
“Why are international companies seeing the value we can provide, but not local businesses? Deloitte found that outsourcing/offshoring to South Africa by many European countries provides them with substantial cost savings, to the tune of up to 40%-50%. With a population fluent in spoken English, cultural affinity and a sizeable talent churn from quality universities, not to mention time zone similarities, South Africa could become one of the world’s biggest and best outsourcing destinations. It may be time for corporate South Africa to wake up and smell the coffee – and the value they can get from local technology solutions,” Firth concludes.