Deegloo

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Senior Managing Director of Hilltop Securities

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Diversified Financial Services Group, Broker Dealer 

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Deegloo to accomplish?

• Discover, Design and Specify of a Risk Management Portal for Clients
• Plan Development Phase

SOLUTION

How did you find Deegloo?

Referral

Why did you select Deegloo over others?

• Good value for cost
• Referred to me

How many teammates from Deegloo were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

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

The scope of work for this project is to discover, define, document, and design the application. The scope can be divided into the following sections:
1. Confirm and document the current business process and a desired business process
2. Discover, define, document, and design application entities
    2.1 Several types of users with different authorities
    2.2 Multiple risk-management entities
3. Discover, define, document, and design all actions between entities, based on the business analysis
4. Discover and document risk-management calculations related to entities
5. Discover, document, and implement PoCs for integration of several external and internal data sources
6. Plan hosting
7. Plan development phase
Key deliverables are specification document and application design documents.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Deegloo designed the required application screens and produced a detailed system specification, including the functional and non-functional specs. The plan for the Development phase, alongside detailed time and cost estimates, was also produced.

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

They're very organized and structured in their approach, detailed oriented leaving nothing to chance, delivered on time and managed expectations very well

What was your primary form of communication with Deegloo?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

Professionalism & ability to deliver on a complex project at a fraction of the cost we would have faced with the domestically-based team  

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

No improvements needed.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Sr Director Solution Consulting of Ever.Ag

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Ever.Ag provides Innovative AgTech Solutions for Food and Beverage Supply Chains

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Deegloo to accomplish?

• Develop a Master Data Management solution to create synchronization mechanisms between multiple systems, golden records and enable much more efficient data ingestion.

SOLUTION

How did you find Deegloo?

• Referral
• Ongoing Partnership

Why did you select Deegloo over others?

• High ratings
• Great culture fit
• Good value for cost

How many teammates from Deegloo were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

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

We needed a team which would use the chosen integration platform to develop a Master Data Management solution, in order to create a golden record between our systems and allow for more robust data management, especially when it comes to inter-system core attributes sync and new client onboarding.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We have created synchronization mechanisms between multiple systems There are now golden records that get updated by those multiple systems We have much more efficient data ingestion Progress is ongoing as we're continuing to add systems that include the above three pieces

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

The team members went above and beyond to hit deadlines, responding in an agile way to changing requirements and evolving needs.

What was your primary form of communication with Deegloo?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

The owner isn't afraid to roll up his sleeves and work on the project himself, he was a very valuable asset to the team. The quality of the work was excellent.

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

Any and all concerns we had and were raised were addressed promptly, there isn't any areas where Deegloo could be found lacking.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

Our company provides payroll and logistics software for businesses in the US dairy industry. We currently have about 87 billion pounds of milk handled through our applications. We also provide risk management and revenue protection services powered by fintech, and these are usually contract-forwarding programs that allow farmers to mitigate the risk with volatile market prices. I do product management for all of our farmer-facing software applications.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Deegloo?

Deegloo helps with the development of many of our products, if not all of them. 

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Deegloo is currently developing our mobile applications, one of which allows haulers to enter the quantity and quality of the milk that they pick up from the farm. This was previously done through paper and was thus open to a lot of errors. Another app that their team is working on will enable drivers to digitize information for the farm and for the milk processor.

Their team does almost everything in Java. The mobile apps are being built for both iOS and Android devices, and we’re now working with Deeglo on a fusion platform that can facilitate exchanges, scheduling, and receiving dairy products. This fusion platform or web portal will go hand in hand with the apps, serving as the milk processor-facing portion of our suite. 

What is the team composition?

We’ve had some people jumping out of the project and some people jumping in, but all in all, we’ve worked with around 10–20 people. This encompasses project managers, senior backend developers, frontend developers, and UI designers. 

How did you come to work with Deegloo?

One of the founders was my colleague at a previous company I worked for. I reached out to him when he started Deegloo and he brought on some people we could work with. We’ve since expanded that initial team.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve invested over $1 million dollars since the partnership began.

What is the status of this engagement?

We engaged Deegloo around March 2017, and we’ve been working with them continually ever since.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Deegloo isn’t really tied in with our business metrics because they’re contracted, but part of our success is due to their ability to complete projects on time. The number of bugs that enter production and are fixed by the team before release is also another factor. They’re communicative and proactively get in touch with our subject matter experts when there is an anticipated delay. 

How did Deegloo perform from a project management standpoint?

They always meet our expectations. They’ve always been clear about the repercussions of any changes to the scope, so if there has been a missed deadline, it was most likely due to some scope creep on our side. We’re always able to work out an agreement that doesn’t compromise the timeline, and in the last five years, their team has never been behind schedule. 

For project management, we use GitLab, Aha!, and Jira, where they log their hours. They’re seven hours ahead of us, so we typically hold daily Zoom stand-ups in the morning when they’re just about to wrap up on their day. We then pick up where they’ve left off. We would also sometimes talk on Slack.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They’re very thorough; they talk about things in a broad way as opposed to giving one-word answers. We can rely on them to really drill down through proper analysis even before responding to us about a problem. It’s rare that they would come back to me without identifying an issue’s core cause or without having already found possible solutions. We can always expect a long report that really assesses the problem and the evidence and eliminates the need for a lot of back and forth. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

The only problem we had was with hiring senior people. We don’t know if it’s an issue with Deegloo or just with the job market in general, but finding really good people has been a struggle. We’ve asked them to ramp up, but we haven’t gotten to where we want to be. It might not be something they could solve, but it’s the biggest thing we’d want to see changed. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Just be willing to give them a try. Whether it’s for a data-related project or something that involves a lot of technical understanding, they’re the team to go with. Simple, superficial projects wouldn’t be much of a challenge for them, and they will definitely be able to deliver on anything heavy.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the lead data scientist and product owner.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Deegloo?

Data warehousing and data analytics.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

After interview we chose this vendor based on their clear proposal and experience.

Describe the project in detail and walk through the stages of the project.

• initial analysis of current infrastructure of databases and analytics algorithms
• building data warehouse and algorithms necessary for the project
• reporting via BI cloud service

How many resources from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

We worked with one of the data engineers.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

• product algorithms based on tracking data
• data warehousing solution with BI reporting

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

They were very prompt and precise in response, we mostly spoke over Slack.

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

Their professionalism and expertise were impressive.

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

Nothing special.