Lingaro Sp. z o.o.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the COO of HealthLabs - a company providing supplements recommended by the best dieticians in Poland. Our products contain high-quality ingredients and formulas with high doses of vitamins and other ingredients, tailored to your needs.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire ORBA, and what were your goals?

With the development of our business, we have prepared a new page of our shop. Its launch required a lot of experience in safe website migrations. The challenge for us was time - to make it before Black Friday. We had to make sure that the new website (its infrastructure and functionalities) could handle the load caused by the heavy traffic.

SOLUTION

How did you select ORBA and what were the deciding factors?

We already knew this company and thanks to our cooperation in projects from the past, we were aware that ORBA will meet our expectations.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

The project in which we engaged ORBA was to ensure that the migration will go smoothly and successfully. The new e-store platform needed to have a conversion at least as good as the previous one. For this purpose, we discussed many questions, problems and potential threats that may occur during the migration.

Basing on these issues, ORBA prepared and conducted complex tests: extensive functional tests, load tests, tests of architectural solutions and network infrastructure to make sure that the new shop will operate fully efficiently.

How many people from the ORBA team worked with you, and what were their positions?

We cooperated with a team of 8 members: 1 Project Manager, 2 Business Analysts, 3 DevOps and 2 Test Engineers.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

The migration process and the sustainability of the shop during Black Friday met our expectations and goals. Performance tests indicated a stability of 95% percentile for GraphQL requests reaching 230-660ms for 5000 parallel users and 2000 RPS. After the stability was achieved, the error rate was insignificant and reached 0.0015% (502.504).

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

We had daily meetings to verify the progress of managed tasks and during the test period, we were receiving functional test results every day. We had transparent communication in our cooperation and were provided with all the needed information to be updated with project progress

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

Maturity in project management and wide range of services at very high quality vs market.

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

The project was carried out excellently, confirming the high level of ORBA's experience.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am a sales manager at MBL Poland. We produce wheelchair parts and also produce OEM complete wheelchair products, which is mainly the rehabilitation branch of the business.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with ORBA?

We wanted to introduce e-commerce into our business model and our B2B segment.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

ORBA did the discovery phase for us, checking our needs as well as our current status. They also looked at our ERP system and analyzed the integration between our ERP system and the e-commerce platform. 

They then made recommendations regarding the e-commerce platform. They also created mock-ups with us and produced a customer journey map, including a detailed description of our processes that can be transferred into the e-commerce platform.

From there, they made recommendations for the future including the MVP phase and the post-MVP phase. This is divided into phases of implementation.

What is the team composition?

We’ve worked with at least eight people, and it is sometimes as many as 10. 

How did you come to work with ORBA?

We ran a tender last year and ORBA Co. was one of the companies that we considered. During the process of sending the inquiry, our financial partner recommended ORBA because they had previously worked together on another project, so we chose them. 

What is the status of this engagement?

We signed the contract with them in April 2020 and have an ongoing relationship.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We’re really impressed by the quality of the feedback they’ve given us, as well as the professionalism of their employees. They aren’t 100% perfect, but they’re very great. They’ve exceeded our expectations. 

How did ORBA perform from a project management standpoint?

They’ve been perfect from a project management standpoint. They are deeply involved in our processes and make recommendations. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

The most impressive thing to me is their knowledge of the e-commerce business and all of the opportunities. They’ve helped us see the possibility of creating needs we weren’t even aware of. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

Sometimes they offer extras that aren’t on our main list of priorities. They won’t inform us of the cost at the beginning, but take a typical sales approach that makes us surprised by the cost, which often exceeds our budget. They didn’t fully follow our budget so we needed to eliminate some of the things generating additional costs. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Define the budget at the beginning. Use their creativity but also ask for the cost to implement the suggestion they give you.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m a VP at a gourmet food supplier.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with ORBA?

We hired them for a number of projects. We’d rebuilt our website with another vendor and had significant issues with the end product we received.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

First, ORBA rebuilt our site’s checkout funnel in a rapid manner. The project evolved to site maintenance and ongoing site enhancements. They next built a website for a separate division for us. Most recently, they built another site for us that specializes in niche products. 

They have the ability to understand the needs of our outfit through a discovery process. When it comes to communicating options, we looked at various platforms, and ORBA didn’t force one on us. Our graphics design team designed all three websites.

What is the team composition?

I believe the team has five people overall, but I heavily deal with two.

How did you come to work with ORBA?

I found them through a reference from some other people in the industry.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in Q4 2016, and the project’s ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

ORBA delivered a system and infrastructure that can scale and weather any problems that come up. Once they rebuilt our checkout process, we saw a significant uptick in our conversion rates. That proved they did it well and right, which is why we still work together.

How did ORBA perform from a project management standpoint?

They do an excellent job of keeping things moving along by whatever means are effective.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their quality stands out.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Everyone’s got room for improvement, and there have been some challenges, but our partnership is coming up 4–5 years. I’ve been happy with them.

Any advice for potential customers?

Determine if you’re looking to build something for the short term or something that will stand the test of time. For us, building a site that can handle that scale was worth the time, energy, and effort to get it done the first time. Look for someone with higher-tier development capabilities and the ability to support you on a long-term basis for those important projects.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CEO of a small e-commerce company based in Sweden that sells furniture hardware to 15 countries in Europe. We’ve been doing this since 2013, but we’ve only started to grow in the last three years. We’re still young and small, but we’re a real company with 5–6 employees in total.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with ORBA?

We’ve worked with ORBA on multiple projects. Since the last year, we’ve been working on a quite large task, migrating the old platform to the newest version. We launched the new site a couple of weeks back.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Essentially, Magento moved from 1.9 to 2.3, and it was time to actually migrate to it. We made the decision to do that in May 2018. They’ve been helping us move all site modules to the new platform, with a completely new backend, and a new look and feel as well. It’s quite a large project.

I believe they worked under a waterfall methodology. We had an initial meeting, where they came up with some ideas on what they thought was very important for the new platform. During a one-day workshop, I basically told them all the parts that were important to us, and we moved from there.

What is the team composition?

I met three people from ORBA face to face during the workshop, but, for the rest of the time, I’ve mostly been in touch with the project manager. I believe there were 4–5 people working on the site part-time for one year. There were 3–6 people involved, counting the project manager.

How did you come to work with ORBA?

I found them through Google around 2015, and I got a feeling from their website that they knew what they were doing. I contacted them, and they were quick and professional in answering me. We had a couple of calls and did a small test project together. We continued from there.

We’d worked with a Swedish company for two years before approaching ORBA, and we weren’t happy with that agency.

How much have you invested with them?

The big migration project was estimated at €50,000–€70,000 ($54,450–$76,230 USD). Adding all the other stuff they’ve done for us throughout the years, it’s probably closer to €100,000 ($109,900 USD). For a small company like ours, that’s a huge investment, but it’s probably small for some of ORBA’s larger clients.

What is the status of this engagement?

I think I first contacted them in May–June 2015, and we started a small project in August or September. The contract with our old agency was ending in July of that year. The project is still ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

I come from a world of large corporations, where consulting firms come in and out without adding that much value. ORBA, on the other hand, tried to add as much value as possible. The project manager understood our needs and was quite pragmatic when it came to what needed to be done. I liked the workshop they had in May 2018, where they made a proper analysis of the situation.

They’re working on fixing bugs right now, and we’re getting further and further to the end of this. That's been painful, but that has nothing to do with ORBA. It’s just a big transformation. They’ve done a great job.

How did ORBA perform from a project management standpoint?

The communication is very good. I may want more at times, but I can also understand their situation. I can’t get a status report every hour. For example, in the last two weeks, I’ve been quite dramatic with the launch of the new site, but they’ve been good at giving me long status summaries every on what was happening. The project manager I’ve been working with has been extremely good.

We’re using an internal communication tool ourselves. There’s an external view mode as well, where I can observe work. They’re using it internally, and I can see time reports and everything else. From a communication point of view, we used emails during the last project. That’s worked perfectly for us since I’ve been solely in charge of the communication part from our side.

It would be different if we were working with larger clients with a lot of stakeholders, possibly with developers on the client side who need to be involved in the workflow. We would’ve needed to use more complex tools on a project like that. For the larger project we’ve had with ORBA, we’ve mainly used email, for status reports.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Anyone can do a good job, but, when it hits the fan, then we can see who’s actually pulling in their weight, determine what’s important, and start working and helping out. ORBA has been extremely good at that, and I’m impressed.

The project manager has been great, but I’ve also got the feeling that they have a lot of good people internally, who know what they’re doing and are good at their skillsets. They’re large enough to have those teams, but still manage to work quickly, and integrate the right people into each team.

Are there any areas they could improve?

It’s hard to say. In retrospective, this project was bigger than what both them and I anticipated. It developed out during the year, and I think that that’s natural to happen when a project runs for more than a year. There are also many outside factors that can change things, like Magento deciding to upgrade their system from 2.1 to 2.3. It came in the middle, and no one could really know about it. That wasn’t taken into consideration, and it couldn’t have been. I’m happy with ORBA, and I don’t have any real suggestions for improvement for them.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

I recommend that clients go to meet them. We visited them in Warsaw, and we’ve tried to go back at least once a year. It’s important to get face-to-face contact and get a project manager that we can work with.