It's never easy to pick the right tech service provider. You definitely have a wide set of criteria in your head. Will their tech expertise be sufficient? How stable is their work? What about their market reputation?
In the end, these questions come to a single word. And the word is confidence. Let’s put it this way: “Can I expect from this company that they will do their work properly, on time, and within budget?”
So, how can a tech service provider you’ve never met, earn your trust?
With clear evidence. It could be positive feedback left by industry insiders or something even more reliable—like ISO certification, a globally recognized mark of quality. When a company gets accredited by an ISO institution, it guarantees predictable processes to its clients, security meeting the highest standards, and many other things.
Being one of the multitude of tech vendors to choose from, at Softeq, we do our best to ease the challenge for our clients. We standardize our processes, acquire global best practices, and obtain ISO certificates to prove it. Based on our experience, we’ve prepared a brief list of the main points you can count on when you work with an ISO accredited tech service provider.
Reason One: You Get a Comprehensive Framework Right from the Start
How it works: The International Organization for Standardization, or ISO, issues certificates for practically every workflow or business process. General quality management systems (ISO 9001), environmental performance (ISO 14001), security management (27000)—you name it. The list is huge.
Each type relies on industry-specific best practices. This way, ISO certificates are a stamp of approval that a certified company works to quality levels that have “passed” globally accepted rules.
How you can benefit from it: So you decide to outsource development services to a company from another country and another culture. There are problems that you’ll most likely face right from the start. One of them lies in having different standards, making it difficult to develop products that will match your specifications.
ISO standards in action: SNOO is an award-winning smart bassinet project. Softeq provided them with a dedicated development team. Our mission was to help develop a mobile app and more secure back-end for the released project. The deadline was tough.
But the processes within Softeq were well-aligned. Because all team members from Softeq are trained and follow the ISO quality management best practices, it was easy for us to deliver a high-quality result on time and within budget.
Reason Two: Your Costs Will Be Much Lower
How it works: Outsourcing is a good business strategy. It improves efficiency, cuts costs, and speeds up product development. In addition to that, it allows companies to focus on their core competencies. That’s why this new business model has been adopted worldwide across both the private and the public sectors.
Here are some insights from Datamark Incorporated, a company that outsources back office services for Fortune 500 companies:
- A company that has been outsourcing part of its services for a year, cuts its costs by nearly a third;
- When the same company goes for outsourcing instead of in-house for three years, it saves up to a third of the project’s budget.
ISO in its turn helps assure that the accredited outsourcing company performs all tasks efficiently and according to the world's highest standards.
How you can benefit from it: If you opt for an ISO-certified service provider, it has standardized practices you can count on. These practices include:
- Faster event resolution. The right processes ensure that the costliest problems will be managed from the beginning. Some of the ISO guidelines prescribe the Corrective and Preventive Action (CAPA) process. This ensures total transparency of the processes as part of a QMS.
- Streamlined change management. ISO reduces uncertainty. Its guidelines help track costs, analyze risks associated with different options, and provide for a smooth transition.
- Reduced impact of human error. ISO helps standardize work processes and reduce the human factor on them.
ISO standards in action: Workflow automation solution development for oil and gas companies is a stellar IoT project delivered by our team.
The company wanted to outsource the digitization of the oil rig inspection process. So, they turned to Softeq’s expertise in industrial automation. Our team delivered a solution that processes data from inspection drones. Then, it uses the received information for electronic document management employing international best practices and ISO-based QMS principles.
Reason Three: Adding extra security to your projects
How it works: ISO has its own 27001 standard that provides a framework for Information Security Management Systems. It contains twelve main sections from risk assessment to physical and environmental security.
In practice, the standard sets up how the accredited company handles security issues. This ensures confidentiality, data integrity, availability of information, and legal compliance. The latter can be of extreme importance in case you work with data-sensitive projects, be it PCI DSS, GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, or others.
How you can benefit from it: If you hire a company that sticks to ISO 27001 standards, you can count on, among other things:
- Adequate protection of your organization's information. This covers a whole range of data: employee and client information, brand image, and so on;
- Compatibility with other management systems standards. If the systems align with ISO guidelines, the systems will work no matter who has provided them;
- Technology and vendor neutrality. That means the tech provider of your choice works with any IT platform.
ISO standards in action: Softeq has a lot of healthcare projects under its belt. Terabytes of personal health data require full protection at every stage of processing. So, we pay extra attention to security management and control. In such projects, our ISO certification ensures that final products meet the most stringent regulations.
For example, we worked on the OBUR Health project, an Uber-like mobile app for healthcare services. It was to demonstrate 100% compliance with the US healthcare standards in order to enter the market. Our mobile app ensured compliance and the project release met with great success.
Reason Four: Getting ISO Accreditation Is a Long Term Commitment
How it works: Achieving ISO accreditation implies a lot of work: overcoming a lot of bureaucracy, improving company operations, and achieving greater accountability. If a tech service provider invests in getting the accreditation, it means that they’ll be around for a long time and grow accordingly.
Certification generally speaking is not a must, but it means a certain level of transparency and quality—it’s a kind of best practice in business collaboration. By getting accredited, your counterpart proves that:
- They have aligned their business to the ISO framework, controls, and principles;
- An external body has assessed that the company is doing what it claims;
- The company passes recertification checks (internal audits) every year. This allows it to stay on track with the compliance requirements.
How you can benefit from it: Softeq is accredited with ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 certificates. To achieve them, we’ve done a lot of work. The whole process took more than a year. It happened due to a huge number of documents to review, processes to upgrade, and trainings to hold. We passed regular consultations with an accreditation issuance body and offline meetings with them. So one can say that we were pretty serious to start the process and in particular to make it to the end.
ISO standards in action: For us, achieving an ISO 27001 and ISO 9001 was not just a tick box exercise. To truly make the journey effective, we inculcated a cultural change into the whole organization.
We changed the whole culture of doing business and organizing internal and external processes. It took many months to embed the main principles into our framework. From then onwards, we at Softeq have been constantly reviewing and optimizing our processes.
To Conclude
Outsourcing is a good way to boost productivity and let experts augment your business at the lowest cost. But choosing the right partner for your technology requirements is a true challenge. Partners work with your data, your project, your money, and your clients. Definitely it’s a kind of relationship that should be based on trust.
ISO helps ensure this trust. Because a company that conducts regular security and QMS audits looks way more reliable. ISO certificates highlight that a company has the right tools and skills to proceed with your project and produce measurable results.
At Softeq, we’re proud to be a reliable partner for businesses from all over the world. Contact us to start collaborating.
