Deliveries without borders
The pandemic has put a halt to both international and domestic travel. But the fact that so many of us have turned our homes into our workplaces has also reduced the importance of geography. It may sound like a contradiction, but as the concept of distance delivery has exploded, the world has in many ways become smaller. In short, that means System Verification’s market is growing.
Over the last eight years, System Verification has opened six new offices in four different countries. CEO Erik Björhäll sees no reason to slow down – quite the contrary, in fact. With an ever-expanding customer base, our internationalisation process continues at increasing speed.
“All analyses and reports from various institutes confirm that working from home, or working from anywhere, is here to stay. It is indeed a ‘new normal’, and it will not disappear once the pandemic has receded. All companies that have reached a certain maturity level have come to the conclusion that it is possible to get high-quality QA projects from remote. We’re a perfect fit for the future here – we can scale our deliveries globally and we have an agile, successful organisation that has managed top-class distributed deliveries for years. In a way, this is business as usual for us, and that gives us a wide open window. Our opportunities are massive,” says Erik.
So there’s a well-oiled delivery machine in place already. But when Erik speaks of international expansion, his vision for the future is clear: he sees System Verification opening up in more places. If location is no longer an issue, why open up new offices – wouldn’t be easier to simply expand the ones that are already there? Erik explains:
“There are several reasons to why physical presence is important to us. First of all, there’s the customer base. To some extent, markets are still local. To reach new and potential clients there is still a need for local networks and knowledge – even if we can deliver our services from other locations. We also want to find the best people within our field. As an employee of System Verification, you can basically live anywhere, but we can of course easier attract talent more easily when we’re in the same country as they are. For example, we opened in Warsaw last year, as Poland is somewhat of a competence hub. The country has many renowned universities and highly skilled software developers.”
Yet another Swedish office is in the pipeline. Jönköping, at the southern tip of lake Vättern, is a city with several large companies and a number of government authorities. System Verification opens up there in August. And with subscription-format services such as Quality Monitoring – where we monitor the customer’s systems from remote, and provide recurring AI and expert-based insights that let the customer predict issues before they happen – Erik sees growth potential in both Europe and the rest of the globe.
Erik Björhäll, Group CEO and CEO Sweden
“Yes, we will continue to grow, and as always, we will do it through teamwork, on both existing markets, as well as new locations. Our European team is very strong, led by Henrik Sällman, CEO in Bosnia, Erwin Probst, CEO in Germany, Łukasz Mazek, senior operation adviser in Poland, and myself as CEO in Sweden. They are supported by our central team on group level; Agneta Larsson, Group CFO, who was also recently appointed Executive Vice President, and our Chief Growth Officer Jonas Gyllenspetz have both worked a lot with our structures, so we can expand into new territories efficiently and swiftly. Just recently, I also onboarded Sabina Engdahl to the team, our new Group Digital Marketing Officer. When scaling our international journey, targeted digital and in-bound marketing is an important success factor.”
Last but not least: our soft values are a firm cornerstone of those structures.
“Our Swedish leadership culture is definitely a success factor, but our key USP is our company culture. It is the foundation for everything we do. We have a flat organization where everyone can grow, and the things we value most include a positive attitude and an open mind. That’s what we look for in people – we hire for attitude, and train for skills,” says Erik.
