Boston SoftDesign

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I run the Customer Support department at Brondell, a company that manufactures bidets, air purifiers, and water purifiers.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

When we contacted BSD, we were seeking development services pertaining to Workato, NetSuite, JIRA, and Zendesk. We've been utilizing their services for operational process optimization, automation, and software stack consulting.

SOLUTION

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

We were brought together by Workato. BSD set itself apart from competitors through thorough requirement building, easy communication, and straight-forward logic.

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

BSD has connected pieces of our operation together, removing manual work after determining requirements. They have leveraged their knowledge of Zendesk, JIRA, NetSuite, and Slack to help deliver efficiencies to customer support and operational workflows.

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

4-5 individuals have worked with us, and I know that many more have worked with us behind the scenes. We generally interface with their Client Director and a few mid-senior developers.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We have become much more automated and efficient after workflows have been published by BSD. They provide in-the-moment troubleshooting as a part of our Slack channels, and provide plenty of clear problems and solutions to our team directly.

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

BSD communicates through Slack and e-mail, ramping up communication frequency when projects are kicking-off or winding-down.

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

They're able to see the logic that will speed up an operation swiftly. Once a requirement is set, the logic is very easy to follow and execute on.

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

No improvements required- world-class experience.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm a Solutions Architect in Integration Space for a leading Retirement and investment Management firm

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Boston SoftDesign?

Our Company Investment Management division would like to integrate with Enterprise Data Foundation Master System for organization and Intermediary master within the Party and Product Platform., integration Master data, Salesforce, and creation of Distribution intelligence consumption platform utilizing Snowflake technology. This will allow for better integration, timely and accurate data and provide additional information such as assets and investments to other LOBs such as EB and RS.

SOLUTION

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

Boston SoftDesign was recommended by workato Product vendor as Integration partner team and they had earlier experience in design and implementation large scale complex integration and design patterns using workato.

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

The project make objective is to enable business users to get accurate and real-time data about mastered organization, partners to enable better lead process. The project involves integration systems like Master data Management, Salesforce, Snowflake and other Admin systems and involves dependency across multiple upstream.

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

We have two integration Specialists resources working for this project

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The project had an aggressive timelines and with new workato integration product with design within a span of for 3-4 months as per expected design to enable the business flows with optimal design.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Team was always available to co-ordinate across multiple teams over zoom meetings, skype and gather business and technical requirements gathering

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

We appreciate the level of effort Boston Group has kept to understand our business domain and there prior experience in working in similar complex implementations. The team has quickly understood the business requirements and quickly set up the new Workato integration product.

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

Not much

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am a Software Engineering Manager at a global education and learning technology company. The Company provides print and electronic textbook curriculum, learning content, and assessment tools and services.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Boston SoftDesign?

AWS Managed Services support

What were your goals for this project?

The goal was to consolidate the infrastructure management approach and have a single entity to assist with AWS Infrastructure monitoring and support.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

We’d already been using BSD managed services in other areas and asked BSD to provide a POC for AWS Infrastructure monitoring and support as well, which resulted our current long-term engagement.

Describe the project in detail.

BSD provides 24/7 monitoring and support services. Their primary function is helping us to maintain 99.99% uptime for our production systems. In the early stages during support onboarding, they assisted with deploying a cloud infrastructure monitoring approach following industry best practices, while sharing their expertise in this area.

Going forward together with their regular support, they assist various application support teams with infrastructure management, including assisting with CI/CD process implementation and management.

What was the team composition?

For all the Managed Support projects we have with BSD, they assign a lead technical engineer to manage and coordinate activities, along with a 24/7 operational team.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

BSD monitors and manages our onboarded infrastructure with the best of care. They are quick to onboard new environments, and always willing to help with the process.

They have established internal processes and documentation that enables the entire 24/7 support team to provide high level support at any time for any environment. They operate with full transparency, and regularly provide reporting on activities, SLAs and uptime stats.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

The workflow between our teams is excellent. They have earned our respect and trust in all areas, and we often turn to their teams for advice for new projects or resolving issues.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

They continually focus on improvements that can be made in our environments. They not only react to issues and alerts but work toward finding and resolving the root cause in order to avoid repeated issues.

They also proactively advise on improvements or best practices that can be implemented in order to improve the performance or security of environments.

Are there any areas for improvement?

I honestly have no answers for areas of improvement with this company. They have exceeded our expectations in all areas.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the Senior Director of Productivity and Infrastructure for Avid Technology with responsibilities for Help Desk/Client Services, Operations, Cloud and System and Productivity and Network supporting a 35 offices around the world.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Boston SoftDesign?

We wanted to consolidate all MSPs to one and chose Boston Soft Design to do this. The first goal/project was to establish a full coverage and monitor all systems and provide 24x7 mitigation support.

What were your goals for this project?

goal/project was to establish a full coverage and monitor all systems and provide 24x7 mitigation support so we will reduce cost and increase the up-time statistics of the system

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

we have asked all current MSPs to bid for the solutions and chose based on references and cost.

Describe the project in detail.

We implemented network monitoring for all network device into a central tool, implemented a event agent monitor on all our VMs and established a 24x7 NOC and 24x7 network and system engineers to handle all escalations and mitigate faults.

What was the team composition?

We created full multi discipline coverage including: Database, System and Cloud, Network, FW/Security and a project manager to coordinate them. We worked very closely bringing Boston SoftDesign to be an integral part of the IT operations.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

All operational incidents regardless of timing, severity are being handled according to process achieving a significant mitigation of faults before they create negative business impact.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Boston SoftDesign are an integral part of our team.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Boston SoftDesign manage and train their people to care and it shows. They not only do the job but also initiate new improvements.

Are there any areas for improvement?

Like with any projects, it seems that at times, in some area of support, our scheduling expectations were more aggressive than what was achieved.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I lead an IT staff of four, servicing two companies with a total end user count of about 100.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

We had a project at about 70% completion. For various reasons we needed a new partner to help get it finished. We had been using in-house consultants at Workato and some 3rd party consultants to build a time reporting system.

It would use a Monday.com board on the front end (time entry), Microsoft Dynamics Great Plains on the back end (accounting system, on-premise), and Workato in the middle to speak with these systems and facilitate the time data sync.

The part of the unfinished project where Boston SoftDesign ("BSD" for short) picked it up is, specifically: To design a recipe(s) in Workato that would run time-interval queries against the company's MS Great Plains database, determine which projects are currently open to costs in GP, and synchronize these project names to a board in Monday.com.

This board is then referenced by the complated time-entry system that is already built in Monday.com, as needed to display open projects in MS GP. BSD also built error checking and Slack reporting into the Workato recipes.

SOLUTION

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

BSD was recommended to us by our account manager at Workato. We had trust in them and we liked BSD after an initial meeting, so we decided to proceed with them on this project.

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

Our partnership with BSD looked like this:

• -Twice weekly, 30 min. Zoom status calls
• -Communication on Slack during the week for testing and bugfixing Some of the requirements and project parameters changed during the implementation.

BSD accommodated this fluidly with minimal additional time and cost. Deliverables included:

• Consultation after receipt of summary SOW from us
• Workato implementation of MS GP
• Monday.com project data sync, error checking, and status reporting
• Full documentation of the Workato recipes Technologies:
• Workato
• Monday.com
• Microsoft Dynamics Great Plains (on premise)
• Slack

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

We had four primary contacts: account management developers (2) scheduler/coordinator

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

While not quite yet in production, BSD's deliverables were on time and functional and well documented.

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

They were responsive about communicating in whatever way(s) worked best, which in this case was a combination of twice-weekly Zoom status calls and Slack messaging as needed. There was some email exchange as needed. Very timely on all channels.

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

For us the great things about BSD are their excellent communication and organizational standards, along with their broad skill set that includes older, on-premise systems like MS Great Plains but also modern platforms like Workato.

GP is still widely used but it has been difficult to find consulting service with GP expertise, and *especially* expertise that also includes modern integration platforms like Workato. They have a great understanding of these technologies from top to bottom and this really accelerated the process.

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

Not that I can think of.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the Financial Controller for a company that provides a platform for housekeeping services within multi-family residences.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Boston SoftDesign?

We needed to integrate Salesforce and NetSuite using Workato.

SOLUTION

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

In scoping, they understand our needs, they were quick to scope and get started on the project, and the price was very good.

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

First, we went through our data requirements for the Salesforce and NetSuite integration. We met each week to discuss the project status. Weekly action items of both parties were clear.

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

Project Manager and a Workato developer.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We have a successful integration between Salesforce and NetSuite that exactly meets our initial requirements.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

We were able to seamlessly keep in touch via Slack. And expectations of both parties were managed through weekly meetings.

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

Overall a great experience. Very quick and easy to get started. Very organized Project Manager. Professional team who was nice to work with.

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

Perhaps a Slack post of action items following our weekly meetings.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am a Lead Developer for our e-commerce applications.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Boston SoftDesign?

Mostly Devops, but we use BSD for other teams throughout the company.

What were your goals for this project?

Stand up and maintain our web presences

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

TBH I wasn't involved in that process, but am glad we did. They have been a godsend to my team and company.

Describe the project in detail.

Devops and overall maintenance or our applications

What was the team composition?

Devops, developers, qa, PMs

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Always on-time and on budget.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

It's been great. Anytime I ask for something I know it will be done correctly.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Their willingness to step in and help us with what we are doing...they are always there for us.

Are there any areas for improvement?

None, they could't be more helpful