Why experience is important in the IT supplier selection

Whether you aim to improve customer experience, optimize business processes or refine/adjust your business model, working with the right software partner is a critical success factor. An experienced IT supplier can boost your ability to innovate and sustain healthy business growth, no matter the business segment you’re active in or the size of your company.

Selecting the best software provider is a complex task. Intricacies appear when considering industry-specific challenges and aligning the decision with all relevant stakeholders. Moreover, keeping up with IT&C technological advancements accelerated by COVID-19 can now double the work in the IT supplier selection process.

The importance of IT procurement

IT procurement has a profound impact on the continuity of operations, the profitability of the company, performance, and productivity. On the other hand, the negative effects of a poor IT sourcing process translate into:

unplanned costs with the acquisition, maintenance, development, and implementation of standard or customized solutions;

high costs for terminating the contract;

interruption of operations in the absence of a competent analysis of suppliers’ capacity;

lack of business continuity plans;

a poorly prepared service-level agreement (SLA);

fraud risks.

Many companies neglect the necessary due diligence and, as a result, might not receive the highest quality standards and value for their money. For this reason, we believe that the level of experience and expertise should be considered a deciding factor in the IT supplier selection process. You should carefully and systematically pre-qualify potential service providers by assessing their experience and expertise.

How to assess the level of experience and expertise

The knowledge and background an IT supplier brings to the table are some of the main benefits of working with them for three important reasons:

Mature IT software providers are more likely to have exceeded diverse IT obstacles and are more accustomed to confronting new issues;

Their greater experience can frequently work in your favor and enhance problem resolution and productivity;

Working with an experienced IT software provider can cut expenses down even more without jeopardizing quality.

While every factor is significant and influential to the overall success of a Client – IT partner relationship, the technical skills of the people allocated to the project is what eventually guarantee the favorable outcome of your project. Prior to working with an IT software provider, you need robust technical evaluations and interview processes in place. It’s important to carefully assess both the provider’s experience with the technologies they will be working with and the experience of individual team members. In this case, the following questions are the most important to ask:

How much prior experience do they have in the industry?
What’s the partner’s experience with similar services: the number of projects completed, the types of customers, and the turnover of the past three years?
Have they collaborated on similar projects or worked in the same field?
Are they willing to provide references or make an introduction to another client?
What have they learned from the past projects, and how do they plan to apply it to the prospective partnership?
Are they planning to hire new employees for your project, or do they currently have in-house talent?
What’s on their tech radar in the short, medium, and long term and how are they dealing with rapid advances in technologies?

If your project is critical to your business, don’t rush to choose a partner only based on pricing or other criteria with short-term impact. A vendor’s pricing or location matters, but these should be far less important than the potential for added value based on technical experience. Finally, when it comes to ROI, consider that the long-term benefits of working with a reputable, competent software development company are more appealing than a low price point, a high net promoter score (NPS), or location. Keep in mind that IT outsourcing businesses are innovators. They can truly bring a plethora of experience, knowledge, and cultural perspective to the table, which generates success in the long run.

Why choose Zitec as your software provider

With 19 years of experience in custom software solutions, eCommerce products, cloud computing, and digital marketing services, Zitec has a team of over 300 certified software engineers, designers, QA engineers, cloud consultants, DevOps engineers, and digital marketing specialists. For our clients, we leverage our expertise and global partnerships with Microsoft, Google, VTEX, Facebook, or Adobe to build the solutions our clients need.

Over the years, we’ve helped many clients become leaders in their markets, sustain accelerated business growth, advance security practices or build strong value propositions and meaningful customer experiences. Our technology portfolio is diverse due to the end-to-end business solutions we offer. We cover all aspects of a project, from ideation to implementation, scale, and continuous improvement. More than that, we invest constantly in informed technology management and strategic decision-making on which technology direction to pursue and which one to avoid.

Software provider selection eBook cover.

Now that we’ve tackled the importance of expertise and experience, we encourage you to download this eBook for free, as it contains further valuable insights about all the things you need to take into account in the IT supplier selection process.