ApricusIT

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am Senior Consultant in our Technology Strategy team of an Omnicom agency. We provide consulting and implementation services for Digital Transformation projects for global fashion, automotive and pharma brands.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

A common problem for global brands is how to preserve data consistency throughout a campaign life-cycle. Global companies have a number of agencies or subsidiaries working in these campaigns. The challenge is that they might be using different names for the same entities (products, campaigns, audiences, assets, etc.) Here's a very common case for name variations or generalizations:

• UK: United Kingdom, Great Britain, etc.
• TV: Television, Cable Broadcasting, etc.
• Social: Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

This makes the management projects across teams and platforms very difficult, as it adds complexity to the organisation of resources and an assets. Most importantly, under-estimating the need for a common taxonomy is a blocker to generate meaningful insights from the media performance data.

SOLUTION

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

We had already successful established a working relationship with ApricusIT and we knew that their knowledge of complexity of martech architecture would make it easier to understand the problem and help us solving it.

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

We had several iterations of a project to coin the implementation strategy. ApricusIT significantly contributed to the process of revealing, formalizing and visioning the end business process where the tool would be the foundational part. We use the term "taxonomy" to describe the set of meta tags and their relations. Each brand or agency has its own taxonomy to describe the entities they use or produce.

ApricusIT proposed to develop and train the ML/AI model to automate the taxonomy mapping routines. This model became the "brain" of the solution and allowed to map thousands of taxonomy tags within minutes without or with little assistance from humans. That frees significant resources for creative work rather than routine one. An overall project has been split into 3 phases:

•  visioning: done in cooperation with the ApricusIT
•  PoC: done by the ApricusIT
• MVP: done by the ApricusIT

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

We had constant communication with an enterprise architect and a senior product owner. Weekly sessions where organised with the extended team which included ML/AI experts, a technology lead, one UX expert and the development team

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

MVP version has been released. There are plans to continue the development. MVP covers all basic flows and solves the primary objectives: - automated ML/AI-based taxonomy mapping - REST API for application integrations - Web-based UI for taxonomy management

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

Taking into account that the project was not the first with the ApricusIT we didn't have any communication or organizational problems, as usual. the cooperation was tight, open, and professional. The team had weekly sync-up and demo calls. Ad-hoc calls, if necessary. English is the standard communication language.

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

Professionalism, dedication, and result-oriented approach. ApricusIT focus on the business result and is ready to be involved in non-tech talks to vision and agree on the best-possible business-oriented process where the tech tool becomes part of the overall solution

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

At this point I believe everything was good. Communication was good despite the distributed nature of the teams.

UPDATED REVIEW

This review was published on September 8, 2022.

Tony Thomas

Head of Engineering, Code

Advertising & Marketing

201-500 Employees

London, United Kingdom

$10,000 to $49,999

May 2021 - Jul 2021

Project summary

ApricusIT supported the development of a custom monitoring dashboard for a global marketing platform. They led the creation of the PoC and actively collaborated with the internal team in building the MVP. 

Feedback summary

With ApricusIT, the KPI and SLA dashboards were successfully developed and integrated into an existing SaaS platform. They demonstrated excellent documentation and honest communication throughout the project. Their result-oriented approach and professionalism made them stand out.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I was the Head of Engineering of a company with offices in different countries. Our key product was the SaaS platform that helps global сlients with marketing process automation

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

We were bringing on new clients and needed to ensure we maintained our SLAs for key areas of the platform. We wanted to accelerate the platform monitoring development and needed a team with established experience, technical excellence and ability to deliver something quickly.

SOLUTION

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

We had already successful established relations with the Vendor so that was not difficult to make a decision to engage them again. They had a track record of delivering.

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

First, it was necessary to instrument the platform with proper metrics as part of the new Non-Functional Requirements (NFR) specification. The challenge here was to avoid deep code refactoring to create those SLA’s. Second, we were looking for visual dashboard options to provide some sort of self-service portal to manage and control those metrics. Finally, changes to the existing SaaS delivery process have been made to ensure that Dashboards to be auto-provisioned as part of a standard delivery process

An overall project has been split into 2 phases:

• PoC: primarily done by the Vendor
• MVP: the Vendor has been actively participating along with our own teams. That was a mixed effort to deliver the project.

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

We had different number of resources at different stages. PoC phase was covered by the Architects from the Vendor. The MVP part was covered both by the Architects to supervise and developers to implement. QA resources were involved as well. In total. I believe we are talking about 6-10 specialists involved into the project.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The KPI and SLA dashboards have been designed, developed and integrated into an existing SaaS platform. All the documentation was delivered and rolled out to the teams. Our teams (dev, support, Client Success) and the Client were able to control the SLA's with convenient visualisations. Yes, the project was successful and is able to deliver a lot of value back to the Client teams who are now able to see any issues and resolve them before it effects the platform.

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

Regular, timely, honest communication was key and we had open and professional communication throughout the project. As with any project, you always get some issues and these were resolved together under the tech leadership from the Architects supervising the project. They delivered on their commitments. English was the language of communication and this worked very well.

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

Professionalism, dedication, result-oriented approach. Very easy to build trust and establish solid working relationships. Our people received really good training and gained a lot of experience from them.

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

From my point of view, everything was done with the necessary level of expertise and dedication.

Star Ratings

Overall rating: 5

Quality: 5

Cost: 5

Schedule: 5

Willing to refer: 5

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I was a Product Manager at a B2B Marketing Automation software company. We enable enterprise clients to manage digital assets and content creation activities.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

Our existing platform required users to be able to create a HTML version of their design in order to automate HTML banners. This was not a skillset that many clients had and so was a barrier to adoption. We wanted to offer a visual no-code HTML banner design solution, but didn’t want to develop it from scratch. Our goal was to find and integrate a third-party solution that would offer drag-and-drop banner creation that would seamlessly work with our software.

SOLUTION

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

We already had positive experience and relations with the Vendor so we asked them to help us with a challenge.

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

We had the following challenges:

• an existing approach for templating based on HTML markup and custom markup to manage variable content
• 3rd party solution needed to be seamlessly integrated into already established user journey without necessity to go into external solution or somehow break it
• Security. Most of our Clients are global enterprises who required high levels of security, especially around the hosting and movement of their assets.

already contracted date to GO LIVE The project had several stages:

• research and selection of potential candidate editors
• PoC to prove and verify the approach
• several iterations of implementation 
• deployment as part of the Platform solution to the Client

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

We worked with 4 people for the project - en enterprise architect, solutions architect, a senior developer and QA engineer. We had existing dev teams responsible for overall Platform development.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

At the end of the project, we had launched a new banner design feature. The drag-and-drop WYSIWYG banner editor - a third-party solution from a company called Bannerwise - had been seamlessly integrated into our existing solution as iframe'd component. This increased the usage of our platform from non-technical clients. All proper security measures were implemented to protect content from unauthorised access and support different authorisation roles existing within the Platform.

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

Communication between the teams was very effective. The team were English speaking. We had daily stand ups through-out the project, as well as regular joint meetings with the third-party. The direct communication with the dev team and architect ensured we were able to react quickly and identify quick solutions to challenges as they arose. The whole project was delivered in several iterations synchronised with our Platform's releases. We have provided access to our source control system for direct commits under our supervision.

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

Constant care about the security.  They had an impressive attention to detail and industry-recognized best practices to solve challenges. Constant communication and readiness to help solve problems as they arose, even if they are not within their scope of responsibility. The whole project was delivered in several iterations synchronised with our Platform's releases. We have provided access to our source control system for direct commits under our supervision.

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

Nothing that I recall. We had a close, partner-like relationship. They were quick to respond to any problems.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I was the Head of Product for a B2B Marketing Automation platform.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

We had an existing platform that was typically deployed for customers on a country by country basis. We worked with the team to transfer and scale the platform in the cloud to accomodate a very demanding global customer. The challenge was to find a cost-effective way to scale the existing product and to ensure reasonable performance across Europe, Asia and North America regions.

SOLUTION

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

My company had a long standing positive and collaborative working relationship with the team, so it was easy to decide to continue to work with them.

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

We had the following challenges:

• Large and complex existing platform
• Existing infrastructure, data models etc. that were not built for the cloud
• Significant increase in volume of files to process (from thousands to millions), growth of data volume (from gigabytes to terabytes) etc.
• Need operate accross geo distributed regions
• Strict budget constraints
• Hard deadlines, with a contracted date to be live

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

We had 10 engineering teams that needed senior, central guidance and expertise to design the solution and help to implement it. The Vendor provided a team of four Architects to dig into the existing infrastructure and architecture and guide the transformation implementation.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We successfully created multi-step transformation plan to accommodate the transition of the platform to new vision. The plan was tightly bound to our client's delivery plan and capabilities required at specific moment in time. The Vendor delivered a 6 month project in 4 months.

When completed, the customer sent us an email saying it was the most impressive program delivery he's ever been a part of. After the transformation and client roll-out the platform operates on top of approx. 1 million SKUs, with approx. 50 TB of assets engaged in marketing compaigns.

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

Work was managed using SAFe and split into Product Releases (PRs) with 2-4 sprints each. We had regular planning sessions at both the PR and sprint level, as well as daily sync ups with dev teams and architect team.

Most communication was through documentation, Slack/Teams and for planning sesssions the vendor would travel with us to meet in-person with our engineering teams. The vendor had direct access to all our engineering tools (e.g. Bitbucket, JIRA and Confluence)

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

Excellent technical skills, understing of business constraints and requirements. The team had incredible dedication and will to help us solve our problems. Ability to propose several solutions with list of Pros and Cons so that we can make an informed decision. Not only a professional team, but also friendly which makes even these tough projects fun to be a part of.

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

No. We had tight schedule with a lot of limitations, plus the close contact with the Vendor allowed us to react on problems almost immediately. The team rose to the occasion and continued to prove why we keep working with them!

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I was a Product Owner and then a Product Director of the Media department in the company which is specialised in providing B2B solutions in the Marketing sphere for the Global clients

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

We were developing a full-cycle Marketing Ad Campaign planning tool for initially one, but later the second Global Media agency. All development and quality assurance stages have been executed by this vendor. Our goal was to automate the process of Campaign creation and Communications Planning, as well as allow to contribute with ideas to the Regional Campaigns by the Strategic Planners all over the world

SOLUTION

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

Recommended by our partners in the corporate network

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

The project has consisted of different almost independent modules. Each of the modules represented one of the key workflow stages of the Marketing Campaign creation process. Also, there were elements of collaboration between users all over the world and powerful gamification aspects. The client agency team was in charge of all new features development and released the project to the end-users and continued to support it.

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

During different stages of the application, the size of the team was varying. The vendor provided us with developers, QAs, and Project Managers. At a high-development stage, 2-3 Agile Teams worked on the projects at the same time.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Two Global Marketing Planner applications have been developed and successfully released to Production. All necessary post-production support has been provided. Currently, both of these applications are actively used and play the main role in the operation of the agencies

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

We worked in the agile environment and were communicating via email and Skype. We used Jira as an issue tracking tool and all project documentation was stored in Confluence.

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

There were pretty high standards of UX/UI and performance aspects. The team had achieved all goals within the agreed timeline and budget. Also worth mentioning the level of Business process understanding was good enough.

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

I haven't really had any complaints during the period of collaboration with the vendor.