Keyrus

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CIO for a global risk management certification. I joined the company about a year ago.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Keyrus?

When we first engaged with Keyrus, we were trying to aggregate data from various sources. We didn’t have a data warehouse solution for a good visualization across multiple data. We had reporting within each of the departments and applications, but we wanted to get a holistic view and pull together executive-level reporting through dashboards so we’d be able to provide insights and leverage information with our board directors.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

I prefer to work in the office, but we worked remotely due to COVID-19. We had already picked out the technology. We selected Tableau for the frontend, Rivery as the ELT tool, and Snowflake as our database.

Keyrus gathered the functional and technical requirements. Their team built out the design of the database and ELT tool, as well as the dashboard layout. Then, they did the full implementation and execution.

Right now, we’re in the warranty period. My team manages the daily support, and we escalate up to them if something doesn’t work out or we need additional knowledge.

What is the team composition?

There were two full-time people and a couple of part-time people on the project. The full-time person was the project manager and business analyst. Then, we had a full-time developer, a couple of engineers for spot consulting work, and an account manager.

How did you come to work with Keyrus?

They came recommended through a key member within the organization. Also, we compared their service, capabilities, and estimate against other midsize players within our area. We selected Keyrus for their knowledge and experience with the technologies we had selected and the case studies we reviewed.

How much have you invested with them?

It was about $200,000 altogether.

What is the status of this engagement?

We engaged with them in early 2020, but we started the project until September 2020. They helped us with a proof of concept, and then they helped us build the next phase of the project. We started the actual production environment in February, and they completed it in June 2021.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Their work improved the velocity of our reporting capabilities. What used to take days or weeks now takes hours to produce, so we’ve saved a lot of business productivity with this project. They also provided training for our team on how to use the application.

In terms of timelines, it was definitely better than if we’d done this in-house. We didn’t have the expertise or capability for the project. In terms of money, it was an investment for us. Keyrus wasn’t the cheapest option, but they weren’t the most expensive.

How did Keyrus perform from a project management standpoint?

They were great. The team was on top of things. They communicated their progress, met deadlines, and followed up with us on what we needed to deliver to them to make sure they met their milestones.

We primarily used Teams, and since everything was remote, all the meetings were over Zoom.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Keyrus stood out for the quality of their developers. They were able to demonstrate their technical knowledge and a deep understanding of our business. It was a big factor to select them.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Since we were 100% remote, we wanted to be more cost-efficient with the implementation. We asked to leverage the Israel team, which had a lower rate card. Keyrus came back and stated that they’d already selected the team. However, I would’ve loved to extend my budget.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Make sure you interview the resources that you’ll hire. Keyrus has many different developers and project managers, so make sure your team has a cultural fit.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We’re an electric and water municipality called Orlando Utilities Commission, and I’m the manager of meter data operations.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Keyrus?

We get a lot of operational data from endpoint devices in the field, so we needed to build a repository to stop throwing the data and start building use cases with newfound data.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Keyrus is helping us develop our meter data platform to retain the original data set and transform them into useable use cases. They designed the preliminary proposed build, which was an AWS cloud-based implementation that was going to be operated by our company, OUC. 

They then helped us design a snowflake database and introduced tools like Tableau to move, transform, and serve the data. In addition, they provided their consulting services, methodologies, project management, training, user acceptance, and cultural change — they’ve been our partner and integrator throughout the whole thing.

We’re currently wrapping up our second long engagement with them to serve about 20 unique use cases around the data we acquired.

What is the team composition?

They have an engagement director and throughout the transition, we’ve had a project manager who was also the lead engineer. We’ve also had 2–4 additional resources depending on the key deliverables, someone who implemented the cultural change and artifact training, and another developer who helped us with the AWS infrastructure.

How did you come to work with Keyrus?

We did a pretty aggressive RFP that launched in May 2019 which garnered 13 submissions. We narrowed it down to six and did a full-day technical session with them. Keyrus came out as the best qualified in terms of methodology, approach, and total cost of ownership.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent about $1 million on their resources.

What is the status of this engagement?

The ongoing partnership started in November 2019. This platform we developed went live in June 2020, but we still have a five-year services agreement with them, which we manage through statements of work through specific deliverables.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Thanks to Keyrus, we’ve been able to fix our service point connectivity model, we’ve built business practices to improve the accuracy of the data, and we’ve improved our operations by about 20% — we’ve been able to fix errors and identify where they’re broken.

We now have a repeatable process to continually improve because we’ve been able to save upwards of 8–12 hours for each data request from the data extract that we’re not able to produce. To have the data available and be able to pull it has been a pretty significant productivity increase. In addition, we’ve been able to replace a third-party vendor that was providing some queries, and we were able to save about half a million dollars.

How did Keyrus perform from a project management standpoint?

They’ve been excellent from a project management perspective. Their methodology is one of the best I’ve seen in the industry and I’ve been at it for a long time. Their methodology involves a set of cost templates, a status charter, and a planning template. We have daily standup meetings and then keep a Zoom room open throughout the day for people to drop in.

Additionally, they’re very responsive. They’re just like an extension of the team so there’s no delay.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I think their recruiting practices are spot on. They hire good talent and give them great mentorship, and they practice what they preach in terms of reviews and constant communication. One thing they told us during the review process of the RFP was the people who lead the project, have also worked for the project — so there’s a lot of real-world knowledge, and their leaders are clearly working leaders. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

No. They’ve been a great partner, and I can’t say enough good things about them. They’ve been very supportive when we’ve introduced some odd ideas or oversimplified things — they’ve just been great to communicate with.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

If you’re going to enter working with them, I think you shouldn’t be afraid to ask them to give you alternatives before making strong decisions. Keyrus is very good at listening and bringing incremental deliverables back before you invest too much. Additionally, be open to the agile process and what they share with you, because seeing is believing especially in this technology.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Head of finance at KUDO

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Keyrus?

To develop our first executive dashboard to streamline data discovery and reporting processes

What were your goals for this project?

To build a dashboard leveraging our sales and financial data where Sr management team can easily find answers to their questions during investor meetings. The secondary goal was to attract interest within other department heads to expand our use of business intelligence.

SOLUTION

How did you select Keyrus?

Initially introduced by Tableau team for a quick proof of concept to make sure Tableau is the right tool for us. Once decided, we have developed project requirement and scope and was able to achieve our goals in a short time.

Describe the project in detail.

Building a few financial and sales view of our client through 4 different dashboards targeted to head of sales and CEO. Keyrus team was fast to understand the intend of each dashboard/view and implement the right solutions in a short time.

The team has the capability of understanding the need of the target audience and implement the views as such.

What was the team composition?

Initially defined the scope of the project with the project manager and the main developer. In later sessions worked directly with the developer to build and review the views.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

I think the turn around time on this project was exceptionally fast. The initial scope of the project has been delivered within 60% of the planned time so we ended up expanding the project scope to include more items that were lower on the priority list initially.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Very smooth and seamless workflow. Through emails and a few online sessions, we accomplished all the goals.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Turn around time and expertise about the tool

Are there any areas for improvement?

Nothing comes to my mind at this point

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm an IT manager at an international airport with over 1300 employees responsible for systems architecture and data technologies.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Keyrus?

We hired Keyrus to help us first develop a roadmap and then help us implement a variety of data technologies.

What were your goals for this project?

We wanted to implement modern data solutions, a data warehouse, ETL and Business Intelligence platforms and help transform our organization to be more data-driven.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

An RFI process wet out detailing what we were trying to accomplish. Keyrus was chosen out of approximately 20 different vendors.

Describe the project in detail.

For the roadmap Keyrus interviewed our primary business units, inventoried our key systems, dove into the accuracy, accessibility and relevance of the data in them, and developed ideas around BI solutions that would deliver value to the organization. For the technologies Keyrus compared various solutions on the market and ascertained which ones would work best for our needs and budgets and then helped us acquire, install and configure them.

What was the team composition?

There were about a dozen people, a couple of project managers, and various data and IT professionals.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Our organization now has the technological foundations to enable us to become more data driven and a roadmap for trying to achieve that goal.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Collaboration was very effective. We were initially worried about that considering they were from a different state than us but it was not problematic at all and their teams travelled in person whenever necessary.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

I was particularly impressed with how they quickly understood our business and how data could help our business units. And of course they were incredibly knowledgeable in all aspects of data technology. Their team members were very personable and experts in their areas. I would highly recommend them for any work of this nature.

Are there any areas for improvement?

No, they really weren't lacking in any areas. Sometimes vendors usually have problems dealing with our stringent cybersecurity levels but these guys understood its importance and kept it front of mind when architecting our solutions.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m a manager of analytics and data architecture at a financial institution. 

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Keyrus?

A legacy data standards system had become a liability because it was difficult to change the code (e.g. it was expensive and time-consuming). So, we wanted to create something more configurable and closer to cost. For the new system, we bought the Alteryx tool. Keyrus served as our development capacity.

For background, we have published data standards for our member banks. Those data contracts prescribe how the banks should send us the data we require to make insurance determinations. Our legacy system checked the data’s quality against that standard. It would validate that the data they sent complied with our published standard. However, the legacy system was hard to change (e.g. it required us to bring in an external partner to make changes associated with adapting our data standard).

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

The project was essentially loading a bunch of human-readable files full of financial information and generating exception reporting (e.g. if the information wasn’t compliant to our standard). Keyrus ended up doing a large percentage, if not all, of the development. 

Our company ran an RFP and ended up selecting Alteryx as the tool for our data quality checking. Keyrus took our .NET code with its rules and transformed it into the workflow using the Alteryx tool. They built on-spec and worked very closely with our internal business analysts and technical people. 

We did another project on the electronic payment side. It was related to our deposit insurance system that generates payment files. This consisted of simply producing the files that we required. We wanted to re-render payment files as electronically formatted data that would be compatible with direct deposit and bulk transfer. So, it converted our flat files into a recognizable form of e-payment.

What is the team composition?

For the first year, there were two developers working with us. I would qualify both of them as senior developers. Then, it went down to one person for the remaining 5–6 months. 

How did you come to work with Keyrus?

We researched online to find Keyrus. Then, we started with a proof of concept. After about six months, the proof of concept became viable, and we switched to full-blown production mode.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve invested about $500,000 in Canadian dollars.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in April 2018, and the project ended in June of 2019.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

This was one of our more successful projects at the company. They went above and beyond. 

We ended up with the fully-featured rules-checking engine we wanted. It’s now in production and in-use on a regular basis. The new system is about three times faster than the older system. It deals with complicated scenarios that the older system couldn’t handle. 

It’s been embraced by all the users, and it probably exceeded expectations. The stakeholders that use it aren’t technical people at all, and there have been no complaints. It’s also easier to change whenever we change our data standard. We can change it a lot faster than we’re used to with our legacy system. 

The workflow is top-shelf complexity — I don’t know if anyone else could have done it. For example, on forums, people with similar performance issues haven’t been able to come up with a solution. 

How did Keyrus perform from a project management standpoint?

They were always in direct contact with stakeholders using the system. They were remote, so we tracked the communication through Slack and used Skype when necessary. 

Keyrus’ developers were both very professional people. Our feedback from our primary stakeholder is nothing but positive about their working relationship.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I don’t have a bad thing to say about them. I never had to worry about the team. There were times when I wondered if it was achievable, but they would always figure it out. After a point in time, I knew they would do a good job. Also, they were able to estimate pretty quickly the effort involved for certain tasks. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

I can’t say that there is. There’s nothing significant enough. I had no problem with them.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Alteryx is a niche skillset. Anyone shopping around for it should know it’s hard to find qualified resources in the Alteryx space. Understanding the limitations of the tool will help them gauge the level of talent needed on the project. We didn’t know the full extent of limitations until we started using it, so I’m glad we had Keyrus to help us figure it out.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I'm a compliance manager at an educational product distributor. We're the country's largest retail operation for college campus bookstores.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Keyrus?

One of our products is college textbooks. There's an issue of counterfeiting in the industry that we wanted to address. We needed a vendor to help us develop a data analytics tool to monitor the counterfeiting activity.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We have to control how many items enter our inventory at different locations and how many are identified as counterfeit. We also have to monitor our suppliers. Keyrus developed a tool that helps us aggregate all of that data and push it into a usable format. We had a workflow in place, which had been developed by our analysts. Keyrus reviewed that workflow and found a significant amount of issues with the product that our in-house analysts had built. They ended up rebuilding the whole thing, automating the process with Ultra. We can now easily get the data we need just by clicking a button. 

What is the team composition? 

We worked with two members of their team.

How did you come to work with Keyrus?

We found Keyrus through a Google search. They had a fair price and they were willing to start as soon as we were ready, so we chose them.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent $18,000.

What is the status of this engagement? 

We worked with them between March–July 2019.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Keyrus automated the process that had been performed by our analysts, enabling us to save a significant amount of time and money. We can now easily get the report that used to take hours to compile.

How did Keyrus perform from a project management standpoint? 

We had daily phone calls and they always kept us up-to-date with the progress. If they ran into an issue, they waited for us to address it and didn't charge us for extra hours. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

They exceeded our expectations. We're very happy with the services they provided. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

I don't have a technical background, so it'd be good to have someone who speaks both tech and non-tech languages to help us communicate a bit better.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Ask them questions and schedule regular meetings to make sure you both understand what direction you need to be heading.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the director of BI (Business Intelligence) and architecture at a spirits and alcohol company. My team consists of developer resources and technical leaders who execute projects from data warehousing, BI, and other reporting needs. We also handle integrations through traditional methodologies, as well as APIs.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Keyrus?

By hiring Keyrus, we were looking to scale our BI team, specifically. Historically, we’ve worked with niche, independent vendors, that brought in contractors in a non-scalable way.

We needed to be able to scale our BI team to deliver faster, newer reporting on our projects for our business.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We’ve taken a project-driven approach with Keyrus. They work on some of the more strategic initiatives we’re working on. The goal is to have them engaged on projects where we need focus; we don’t want them flip-flopping between too many competing priorities, so we can have a dedicated team.

Specifically, the projects they’ve been working on with us have been in two buckets: One is around machine learning, so they’re helping us deploy machine learning algorithms. We’re using their resources to build decision trees built in Python, do data cleansing and learning, and to generate outputs from various input data sources. They’re required to produce some accuracy measurements to give us a sense of confidence as to how good the machine is operating. We share those metrics all the way up to our executive level.

The other stream is on our power BI deployment. We’re moving away from a traditional BI model, and away from our Oracle BI reporting platform. We’re moving into deploying power BI as a more modern, visual tool. Keyrus’ expertise in that modern space has helped us a lot.

They come with strong developer resources, as well as strong project management resources to deploy reporting. They also help optimize our data models, and we want to continue to accelerate that. We’re just building upon our partnership and upon the knowledge that they come to the table with; they know the beverage and alcohol space fairly well. For that reason, they’re able to accelerate a little quicker, when it comes to deploying new data models on that platform.

In the past, working with other vendors not keen on our industry, we experienced a longer data education process. Keyrus, however, helps us accelerate the process and we use them to deploy what we call “self-service BI,” in terms of training and enabling our business to build their own reports. With this process, the business doesn’t have to always come to IT to build new reports.

What is the team composition?

There are four key people on our team. The first two are a project manager and a lead developer, who have the largest time commitment.

We also have an account executive, who serves as a main point of contact if we have an escalation; she also joins our weekly calls and any upcoming work is typically discussed with her.

Lastly, we have an SME. That person is someone is that’s familiar with the alcohol and beverage industry. They’re also the lead of the data science practice areas. Not only do they assist me in contextualizing the nature of the data, but they also come in when we need their machine learning expertise.

We also have a very specific data scientist person that we’re not engaging right now because that part of the project is closed, for the time being. They do very specific Python programming and all of the data cleansing for the machine learning engine.

How did you come to work with Keyrus?

We heard of them through an affiliate. We’re a global company, and one of our other branches used Keyrus in their region. They put their North American representation in touch with us, and we went with them. At the time, we were unhappy and in-between BI partners; we shifted to them without too much of a competitor search.  

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve invested over $500,000 with them.

The first year was around $150,000. In the last year, we used a lot more budget because we have those two initiatives that have ramped up recently.

What is the status of this engagement?

We began working together in June 2017, and our engagement is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We’re using Microsoft Excel to see a detailed schedule of what was completed. We also have a budget tracker to monitor their time. 

Although it’s a little early to discuss tangible results, the outputs from the machine learning project are being deployed right now. It’ll be used as a measurement for our distribution partners, in terms of what we’re asking of them as targets, for the upcoming fiscal year. It’s very promising and has the buy-in from the executive level, so it has a good amount of support behind it.

On the BI side, we’re rolling out a new corporate reporting portal. Keyrus was able to reimagine it based on our business process but also brought UI experts to the table to improve how people interact with it.

How did Keyrus perform from a project management standpoint?

We run in an agile format. Over a six-week timeframe, we’ve been able to build, and get user input, and roll it into each sprint. Ultimately, we hit the date we were aiming for, which shows maturity in how things are managed, and how they’re able to react to our needs. It’s also helped IT form a strong bond with the business here.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They provide really strong service at an extremely reasonable rate. In my opinion, that’s why they worked for us.

Are there any areas they could improve?

We attempted to do the project management internally; however, the work suffered because our internal resources were spread very thin. The blame was really on both sides. It shed light on the fact that we needed stronger project management representation from Keyrus’ side. Maybe some of the projects we had might’ve run smoother if that were the case.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

My advice to another organization is to be realistic and to look at that their own capacity limitations. They should speak with their account executives at Keyrus to put a team in place that will be effective for your specific needs and challenges.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the data analyst at a 3D printing company. I produce dashboards and reports for all internal departments and conduct ad-hoc and custom analysis to highlight trends and recommend action.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Keyrus?

We needed a data warehouse to connect our various systems to produce actionable intelligence, particularly around sales and marketing.

What were your goals for this project?

Produce a data warehouse in our Amazon Redshift environment that could be queried for analysis of sales and marketing data, build a basic structured database to store user's printer data, and build 3 dashboards for leadership.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

They were brought in by my predecessors.

Describe the project in detail.

Discovery was completed when I joined, and we were moving into initial development. We determined the business logic, rules, and limitations that the data warehouse would need to implement and circumvent. We then developed dashboard prototypes and validated the numbers against departments. After production and adoption of the dashboards, there was ongoing support to extend functionality and fix issues.

What was the team composition?

A project manager, 2 BI engineers (primarily writing SQL queries and building Mattilion pipelines) and one data visualization expert.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

This allowed automated and more accurate reporting of basic metrics across the organization as well as performing ad-hoc investigation to develop strategy and tactics.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

PM work was well done, kept in focus with enough flexibility to handle changes as challenges were surfaced. Most of the high-level task reporting were handled with a Trello board and Google Sheets were often the reference documents.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

They translated nebulous requirements into concrete tasks and schemas, which was a great help (as was their project management). Their engineering team and visualization expert were great at what they did, able to execute impressive work quickly once the tasks were properly defined.

Are there any areas for improvement?

Sometimes the core understanding of the business needs were difficult to be heard.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Director of IT of a financial services company

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Quantitative Hedge Fund

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

• Cloud migration

SOLUTION

How did you find Keyrus?

Referral

Why did you select Keyrus over others?

• High ratings
• Close to my geographic location
• Pricing fit our budget
• Great culture fit
• Good value for cost
• Company values aligned
• Previous Engagement

How many teammates from Keyrus were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

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

Cloud migration and modernization. Migrate on-premises datacenter resources to a secured private cloud on AWS. Architect cloud foundation utilizing infrastructure as code best practices with Terraform. Modernize software development stack to utilize serverless container based services.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Project delivery within established timelines.

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

They had excellent project management. It was expertly run with daily standups and biweekly sprint planning plus retrospective sessions. Project deliverables were delivered on time. Priorities were updated as needed during the project by consensus.

What was your primary form of communication with Keyrus?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

Keyrus is a collection of high caliber individuals who have expertise, breadth of knowledge, sound principles based on experience, great communication skills, and are apt at managing expectations.

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

None I can think of at the moment.