AEX Soft

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Marketing of Taylor Corporation

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Taylor Corporation's companies connect brands with customers throughout their customer journey.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire AEX Soft to accomplish?

Build a platform for scholastic event planning.

SOLUTION

How did you find AEX Soft?

Referral

Why did you select AEX Soft over others?

Referred to me

How many teammates from AEX Soft were assigned to this project?

6-10 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

AEX built our prom planning platform from the ground up and is continuing to work on the back-end tools, fundraising integration, and marketing e-comm connections that are a part of the platform.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Sign ups on a successful platform

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

AEX works in two-week sprints with weekly or bi-weekly calls with us to check in. They used Figma and Slack as well as updating Wikis to ensure that we were all on the same page.

What was your primary form of communication with AEX Soft?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

AEX responded to our needs and provided good communication despite a language and timing gap between our companies. They have been proactive in ensuring that we (non-developers) understand the requirements and deliverables they would be providing.

Are there any areas for improvement or something AEX Soft could have done differently?

We could have spent more time upfront together with AEX understanding the functionality of each feature of our platform fully or allowed more time for testing and iteration on the back-end.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Development and Security Manager of a software company 

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

A SaaS fundraising platform for individuals, small groups, nonprofit/charity organizations, and enterprise CSR programs that let people create interactive fundraising experiences. Our platform has multiple fundraising activities that users can utilize to create their ideal event experience.

The platform is web-hosted and it allows users to interact with it via their web browser on a desktop, tablet, or mobile device. Organizers create fundraising experiences in experience set up, and their donors visit the organization’s fundraising pages to make donations and other transactions.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire AEX Soft to accomplish?

• Feature Development
• Bug Fix
• Optimizations

SOLUTION

How did you find AEX Soft?

Referral

Why did you select AEX Soft over others?

• High ratings
• Pricing fit our budget
• Great culture fit
• Good value for cost
• Company values aligned

How many teammates from AEX Soft were assigned to this project?

17

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

AEX Soft cotinually supports us with new feature development, break/fix and optimization for our application.  

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

• Break Fix SLAs
• Feature Development w/ ROI metrics
• Technical debt optimizations w/ system metrics

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

AEX Soft is very responsive and meets majority of our needs on time with quality outcomes.

What was your primary form of communication with AEX Soft?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

AEX Soft is extremely agile, possesses significant expertise in the SaaS market and simply "gets it" when it comes to SaaS and developing platforms.

Are there any areas for improvement or something AEX Soft could have done differently?

Nothing at this time.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I'm the CEO of ClearMechanic, a software company. We provide mobile and web software for automotive repair shops.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with AEX Soft?

We initially hired AEX Soft to create a web app that allowed our customers to share real-time updates with their final customers.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We later expanded the project to include a mobile app to take photos and videos, as well as many new functionalities over the last 10 years, including native WhatsApp functionality, custom report generation, and CRM functionalities (appointments/calendaring, task scheduling, and completion). In summary, AEX Soft has created a robust web and mobile app that is a leading product for car dealers and automotive repair shops. 

The main features and functionalities included in the web and mobile apps developed by AEX Soft are:

- Appointments (creation and modification of appointments for the final customer)
- Repair Orders (this is the main work product of auto repair shops...creation and modification)
- Workshop Planner (creating and assigning jobs for auto mechanics in a calendar UI, allowing for starting/pausing/finishing jobs)
- WhatsApp Conversations (recreated something almost identical to WhatsApp in our product, using Meta APIs)
- Customizable Reports (our customers can build their own downloadable Excel reports by selecting from 100 possible variables)
- All of the above has been recreated in the mobile app, except Customizable Reports.
- HD Photos and Video Capture (taken in a mobile app, ability to add arrows and circles to indicate where vehicle damage is...these photos and videos are associated with a Repair Order)
- Customizable Inspection Checklists.

What is the team composition?

Currently, we have 18 teammates from AEX Soft working on the project.

How did you come to work with AEX Soft?

We found AEX Soft through an online search. We did six-month trial periods with three different software developers: one was AEX Soft, one was a provider in India, and the final option was an in-house team of developers in the U.S.

After two months, we discarded the option in India due to missed deadlines and communication issues. We were down to two providers. Over the next four months, it became clear that AEX Soft was the best option due to their intelligent follow-up questions, work ethic, and the quality of the software they were launching. 

We have now worked with AEX Soft for over 10 years and consider them an invaluable part of our team. There have been several key moments where third parties evaluated their code and architecture and said they were impressed by AEX Soft. The first of these key moments was when we raised a round of venture capital, and the VC firm praised AEX Soft during their technical diligence. Another moment was when we hired a U.S. software consulting firm to help us improve our development processes, and the consultants told us AEX Soft was one of the strongest teams they had ever seen.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in 2009, and the engagement is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

We have grown from a handful of paying customers to being the leading provider of repair shop software in Latin America, with hundreds of enterprise customers. Some of our well-known customers include Jaguar Land Rover Latin America, General Motors Mexico, Hyundai Peru and Chile, and BMW Peru and Chile. Our customers have increased by a factor of 300. 

This growth has solidified us as a leading software provider in the Latin American automotive industry, which allows us to compete for big enterprise deals every year. We also have 60 team members now.

How did AEX Soft perform from a project management standpoint?

AEX Soft's project management is very good. The most important differentiators of AEX Soft versus other providers we initially tried out and others we have seen in the market are that AEX Soft is full of really smart people with great ideas and that AEX Soft is responsive to feedback. If there is a particular team member who needs to improve or is not fitting well with our culture, AEX Soft will give direct feedback to that person, and they will either improve or leave the project. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

Apart from being really smart and responsive to feedback, AEX Soft's hiring process is extremely selective and difficult.

Are there any areas they could improve?

The biggest point of friction we have had is how to improve communication between AEX Soft's team and our Latin American QA and BA team members. There are cultural differences and time zone issues that can create stress for both sides. We have improved a lot on this, and to be clear, this is not AEX Soft's fault, but instead a collective issue that all of us have in a multicultural remote workforce with a 12-hour time zone difference.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am an executive of Moonpanda, a ConTech project management tool.

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Project management tool

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire AEX Soft to accomplish?

• We needed to create our MVP product as we didn't have anyone technical on our founding team.

SOLUTION

How did you come to work with this vendor?

We vetted several vendors through Upwork over the course of about 4 months. AEX was the only team that consistently impressed us.

Why did you select AEX Soft over others?

• High ratings
• Good value for cost

What was the team composition?

We had a full team of engineers and a product manager. We had our own design in-house.

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

AEX helped us from inception to to MVP and beyond. We continue to utilize them for ongoing support and new roadmap initiatives.

How much have you invested in them?

To date we have invested about $50k into this project.

What is the status of this engagement?

We are actively working together and will continue for the foreseeable future.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

The team at AEX provided us several recommendations that we have implemented into the product. They are extremely knowledge and given the chance will help guide you in the right direction.

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

As with any engineering team, if you aren't technical there is a learning curve. Once we were able to get going it was easy to identify where we were in the process and the status of the work in progress.

What was your primary form of communication with AEX Soft?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

The team at AEX are genuinely good people who care about their work and their customers. They are always seeking feedback and actually implement the feedback given.

Are there any areas for improvement or something AEX Soft could have done differently?

Not really, I think like with any new engineering team there is a learning curve from both sides.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

I would recommend being very clear about what you are looking for. Have all of your pieces planned out and don't leave anything up for interpretation. If you want their opinion, ask.