"OneShoring", something completely different from 'offshoring close to home'

Conclusion too has tried offshoring in the past, but this form is not suitable for our type of service provision. After all, we always work closely with our customers. We believe it is important that our teams thoroughly understand our customers' processes, otherwise you cannot deliver services that truly meet customer needs. You can only create such a situation if the international team members form an integral part of the local team, and if the work culture of international team members matches that of the Dutch people in the team.

At the same time, we are of course faced with a labour market challenge. The 'war on talent' is fierce, especially if you are in fact looking to recruit employees who match the Conclusion DNA. And by that we mean people who are proactive and critical and who come up with original ideas, i.e. not just employees who simply carry out a task that is assigned to them. We all know that these specialists are scarce. Universities and higher and medium professional education institutions train too few IT specialists. And you certainly won't find any experienced software developers. Even recruiting people without IT experience, but with the desire to learn the trade is very difficult.

Luckily we found a solution for that: OneShoring. We welcomed three companies from Portugal and South Africa into the Conclusion ecosystem. These companies continue to serve their local clientèle, but they also provide expertise to our Dutch customers. These are companies that are culturally close to us and that have the right Conclusion DNA.

When our Portuguese or South African colleagues work for a Dutch client, they form an integral part of the Dutch customer teams. In fact, we work in exactly the same way as when we put together a fully Dutch customer team. We adapt the team to the project requirements, the type of service requested, the skills required and the costs, whilst taking into account any restrictions of course. Since our teams in the Netherlands are already used to hybrid working and collaborating remotely via Teams and other digital tools, nothing else actually changes in the way we work (except for the language).