Exponentia.ai

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm a consultant on behalf of an Austin Texas-based Real Estate company that invests in commercial real estate across Texas focussing on Austin. We do multi-million$ annual revenue in this segment.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Exponentia.ai?

I engaged Exponentia.ai from the initiation of the project when my parent company started looking at investment opportunities in the Austin real estate market right after the Austin market real estate surpassed almost a skyrocketing growth due to the American relocation trend during the pandemic.

I approached exponentia.ai with a problem statement and a dataset in order to help my parent company to enter focused investments in Austin commercial market. Exponentia.ai excelled in all stages across the engagement. 

SOLUTION

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

I was recommended Exponentia.ai by a referral (an old trusted friend) and Exponentia.ai excelled at each and every aspect of our engagement. This selection did not involve competing bids.

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

They ideated the solution, ran business and techical analysis of the problem statement, utilized cloud based technologies to devlier several BI dashboards, advance analytics solution utilizing public cloud.

They had a stellar record in two things 

• Competency: Exponentia.ai brought experts at every stage of the project and an important member of Operations (COO team member) consulted across the lifecycle of work. It enabled the client / my partner company to deliver on business outcome. Secondly,
• Exponentia.ai underpromised and over-delivered within the initially estimated time and budget. Although this project requirement involved a public Texas state open dataset which was an unstructured dataset with a lot of difficult data cleaning issues, analytical challenges, but Exponentia.ai kept the outcome always within the client's (my partner firm's) reach.

The engagement manager Austin R was kept updated and informed along the way much better personal engagement than even companies such as Accenture and others I have personally worked in the past. I recommend partnering with Exponentia.ai for any difficult data, cloud, BI or advanced analytics.

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

Their founder and COO's team were my points of contact and they brought in 4 more people across Business Analysis, Business Intelligence, and a Data engineer.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Most of the project deliverable is not in the public domain since it is for a private company. The project of delivering the Real Estate business intelligence information has been a huge success within the organization in Q1, 2022.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Highly effective using contemporary tools desired by the client team including email, phone calls, chat based communication, regular cadence of meetings etc.

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

The all-round team and the habit of underpromising and over-delivering to excel in client expectations.

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

They need to grow faster than they have so far such that a lot of clients can benefit from their stellar service.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We’re in the business of vacation ownership. Outside the US, we’re the largest vacation ownership company in the world. I’m the head of analytics for the company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Exponentia.ai?

There was a very complicated QlikView report that I wanted them to make. It contained a lot of very difficult calculations and three layers of processing. Secondly, I required 10 other reports involving a lot of big data processing to visualize the data.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Exponentia.ai first created the delivery architecture. From there, they went on to create various modules for how the data would be ingested: what program would be there, what language one should select, what capacity we should keep, and so on.

They tested out a few technologies, namely Kassandra, MongoDB, and AWS, and they finalized the design after that and then got on to the work.

The frontend was Power BI, as per our choice. We were looking at Amazon QuickSight at first, but it had a lot of limitations.

They trained our team, and they set up certain tasks to be done on a regular basis.

What is the team composition?

We worked with four people from Exponentia.ai: a business analyst, two developers, and one project manager.

How did you come to work with Exponentia.ai?

When we were thinking of outsourcing our first project, our CFO mentioned that she’d worked with Exponentia.ai in the past. We asked for bids from them and our existing vendor, and Exponentia.ai’s offer was far better. Their rigorous approach in executing the project convinced us to award them the second one.

How much have you invested with them?

The cost for both projects combined was around $40,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

The first project ran between August–December 2018, and the second one was between February or March 2019–April 2020.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Delivery time, quality, and the amount of back and forth were things that we monitored strictly. Exponentia.ai’s performance was up to the mark in terms of report accuracy and the flexibility for anyone to use those reports.

What wasn’t up to the mark was the delivery at their end. There were also some reworks. They put together a solid architecture.

Exponentia.ai’s work improved our team’s productivity. The data is all there, so we don’t have to worry about it, and we can go into analysis straight away. Most of the analysis is already done, in terms of good visualizations.

How did Exponentia.ai perform from a project management standpoint?

Meeting deadlines wasn’t good, but it was our problem as well, to some extent. They had their own issues, separate from ours.

The deadlines were properly set, but Exponentia.ai underestimated the complexity of the work. However, we weren’t able to explain very well how things needed to be calculated. It was a problem from both sides, but more from theirs. Fundamentally, they underestimated the work We communicated over email.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They were very committed. Although they surpassed the deadline and there were mistakes from both sides, they remained committed to the project and delivered excellent work.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They should improve on managing the project more tightly, and they should spend more time understanding the requirements. For a particularly difficult project, they need to spend a considerable amount of time before making a proposal. It was done well in project number one, but it was lacking in the second one. There was some time overrun in project one as well, but the problem was ours. In project number two, the problem was 70% theirs and 30% ours.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

I’d tell them to ask for a good project manager and interview that person. That’ll make or break things. If the technology is agreed upon, I’d also ask for CVs for the developers and the business analysts. Thirdly, the client should be very clear on what they want. Communicating the requirements through a document would be stellar.