Building Resilience with Offshore Software Development Center

Three of four CEOs of healthcare companies see a decrease in rising costs as one of their critical financial priorities. Working with a partner with Remote Delivery Center capabilities has proven to keep organizations innovative and technologically advanced while saving resources to focus on their core business strategy.

Like many other global companies, our client needed to rapidly increase its capacity to develop software solutions for the company's needs. Obsolete software, advancing competition, the need for stable R&D progress and easy scalability were the main challenges they wanted to address.

Our client wanted to focus not only on cost-cutting but on improvements in Total cost of ownership, ROI, and value creation of software development. Working with a reliable and experienced technological partner like Scalefocus gave them access to a vast talent pool of software developers without the recruitment, training, and onboarding hassle.

The Offshore Software Development Center that we established helped the client to shape a well-connected ecosystem of software products. The OSDC proved to be one of their most viable investments in terms of digital transformation. Our software development and R&D teams shared the responsibility for the software and product development, providing the client with enough time and resources to focus on their core business, to launch products faster, and to save the costs involved in staff hiring and infrastructure maintenance.

Digital transformation through DevOps maturity

DevOps has transformed the IT industry by changing the way teams operate and collaborate. By following the DevOps maturity model, we helped the client identify their organization's strengths and weaknesses and focus their efforts on critical areas that needed improvement.

Our Offshore Software Development Center enrolled a significant transformation initiative – moving away from Microsoft's Team Foundation Server (TFS) to a next-generation development management system. The TFS was used as a centralized system to manage the whole software development cycle and the complete source code. But it was an outdated approach using a central repository, where distributed depository would have been more beneficial for the client's team – giving them the flexibility to work locally without relying on a central server.

We conducted numerous interviews with the relevant stakeholders to determine the current "as is" IT environment and identified any gaps in the process. Our teams determined the pain points and offered a few sustainable solutions. Our client chose Azure DevOps Server as a viable solution, and we implemented it. The migration provided the client with full control of how and where data could be stored.

As healthcare providers need to comply with rigorous data safety regulations – the information was stored on-premises. Our solution made sure the information was cloud-ready and could be easily transferred at any time.

The RDC also helped the client to reach DevOps maturity. Following the SAFe methodology, we implemented DevOps to break down organizational silos and developed a Continuous Delivery Pipeline (CDP) – enabling our client's teams to deliver market-leading solutions at much greater speed. The result – highly agile teams able to deliver value whenever there is a business need.

Accelerating productivity with modernized UI and UX

Another important project that our OSDC delivered was the modernization of the UI/UX of newly acquired software, expanding the client's capabilities for Tissue Diagnostics (RTD) Advanced Staining. All of their software products follow the concept of One Company Design – the same look and feel across different applications. The software that we revamped is aimed to facilitate the work of laboratories and medical personnel. It enables them to understand the performance of various medical hardware devices through detailed, high-quality visualizations such as test progress updates and task completion levels.

Our OSDC revamped the software and aligned it with the One Company Design requirements of the client. The challenge was to modernize the UI/UX while keeping the functionalities and build an intuitive experience for users with various technical competencies. The modernized UI/UX led to two times higher productivity rates among end-users

Optimizing performance through R&D

One of our clients' products enables medical personnel for early diagnosis of cancer through examination of cytosmears. The hardware takes samples automatically in 5 steps, but one of these steps still involves manual interactions. Our R&D team had to develop the necessary software that would automate this process.

We were collaborating with the client's team and external teams responsible for developing the hardware. Our teams built several MVPs using different technological stacks. They consulted the client at every step of the process, advising them of the pros and cons of the suggested technologies and verifying and testing their productivity and performance. For the first time in the company's history, software and hardware will be developed simultaneously, thanks to the extended R&D capabilities that our RDC provided. Following our advice, the client also chose this to be their first hardware with embedded Linux.