Outsourcing CAD Offshore: Assessing Service Provider Reliability
Outsourcing CAD Offshore: Assessing Service Provider Reliability
If you have decided to outsource some of your CAD to an offshore service provider (”OSP”), it is important that you carefully evaluate your potential partner first. Outsource to them only if they successfully pass through your appraisal sieve. Here are some important evaluation criteria and methods for assessing them:
—> Criterion: The OSP Should Be Web-Savvy Check if the OSP has a website. If they do not, in all probability dealing with them will yield a bad experience. If they have a website, check whether their postal address and telephone number are displayed on it so that they are physically reachable.
Give the OSP credit if the website has mostly text with limited graphics, has almost no animation, clearly explains what the OSP is doing and is easy to navigate. This implies detailed knowledge on website design, which increases their ‘web-savvy’ rating.
Your CAD outsourcing is most probably going to involve transferring large amounts of data over the web. This calls for an OSP who is proficient with email. To evaluate this, send the OSP a message asking for more information and see if you get a response within 12 hours. The response should be perfectly focused on your question. You have to be careful an autoresponder (ie, a web-based answering machine) is not replying to you, so formulate your question to require a tailor-made reply.
Subsequently send two more questions related to the work you are considering giving the OSP. Check whether these responses too are timely and relevant. If the OSP has a form on their website for sending them email, give them extra points (smart webmasters
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