Fabrit Global

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Founder and CEO of Chime Care

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

We are a platform provider of home care services.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Fabrit Global to accomplish?

• Develop an MVP
• Progress the MVP to a launch ready product

SOLUTION

How did you find Fabrit Global?

• Online Search
• Other

Why did you select Fabrit Global over others?

• High ratings
• Great culture fit
• Good value for cost
• Company values aligned

What was the size of Fabrit Global’s team?

6-10 Employees

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

MVP: Creation of a lean functioning platform that illustrated the functionality for the purpose of raising our pre-seed round and early testing. The deliverable involved creating a progressive web application with 2 mobile applications for the two sets of users we have and our admin portal. Platform development: The development of our MVP into a complete platform in which the deliverable included:

• UI/UX overhaul
• Compliance review
• Addition of new features and processes Automation

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

• MVP development - basic functionality
• Beta testing
• MVP Progression to Version 1 - more sophisticated design and functionality

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

The project management was extremely well executed. Communication was completely clear with regards to deliverables and timelines. When the inevitable bumps occurred they informed me in a timely fashion with an explanation and plan of action. They always respond to any of my questions and adjust their style to meet my needs.

What was your primary form of communication with Fabrit Global?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email
• Messaging App

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

The clear investment of time and effort they put into understanding our business so they that they could better serve the problem we were trying to solve.

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

In my ongoing experience Fabrit Global, I cannot fault them in a single area.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Neurolabs is developing computer vision algorithms. I am one of the co-founders and CEO, with professional experience in Machine Learning.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

We did not have a web interface for our platform. We do not have any fullstack engineers working for us.

SOLUTION

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

Reviews, pricing and responsiveness.

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

We had a kick-off meeting in which we decided the scope of the project based on wireframes done by Neurolabs. After that, Fabrit took care of the web interface implementation in Angular, whilst Neurolabs' engineers did the backend. Communication was flawless, through Slack. Task management was done on Notion. The web interface has 13 individual workflows, from dataset creation, to model training and deployment.

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

One junior developer, one mid-level and one senior. Moreover, we've had regular check-ins with the founder to ensure that we are on track.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We have a working Alpha version and we've started user testing, less than 4 months after deciding that we want to build this web interface.

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

We had regular weekly check-ins and we were in touch (engineer to engineer) roughly every day. We used Slack, Zoom and Notion.

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

They really care about delivering the product! It's not expected that people will put in long hours just to meet your deadlines, but Fabrit did that and more! It's hard to define a task perfectly from the beginning, but with Fabrit it's enough to define the essentials and they will go above and beyond to make the results impressive.

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

We would've loved some more in-person communication, but with covid and the distance things had to be done online. Next time we'll try to travel to have some more face time.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the CEO of a healthy organisation. We offer products and services for healthy eyesight.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

Since we received many requests for advice on how to take care of vision when we are in front of a device, we chose to create a series of practical and theoretical tips that interact dynamically with users who want a more rested view.

We needed this application to be scalable and allow users to choose what kind of practices they want to use by disabling those that are not of interest. Fabrit Global helped us by creating the windows version of the desired application in a modern design.

SOLUTION

How did you select Fabrit Global and what were the deciding factors?

I also worked with Fabrit Global between 2014-2018 and I knew that it was enough to tell them what I wanted and in the shortest time they will implement what I needed to make a long list of requirements.

Therefore, the confidence given in the past to make a quality product over time, was the decisive factor in their choice - once again.

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

They helped me create a modern windows application with 4 main functionalities and a settings function. Each functionality has 2 secondary functionalities that can be activated or deactivated depending on the user's wishes.

All features are designed to help device users rest their eyes while working with the computer. Fabrit used ASP.NET to create this windows application.

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

I kept in touch with 3 people, including the co-founder Alex Faur. The other 2 people were the programmers who took care of the implementation of the application. Most of the time was enough to talk with those programmers.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The product came out on time, especially since an MVP was needed to be delivered in 30 days - even in an unpolished form. Then the final version was created in the set time and so we have a new product that is adored by our customers.

What's next? New functionalities that will be developed by Fabrit that will increase the value of our product.

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

We used app.asana.com to have an organized list of task that we needed to be done. Also, we have used skype for having periodic live meetings in the first steps. Also I used skype for chat when was necessary any conversation with all the members of the team.

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

The main fact that I liked since 2015 in the FABRIT GLOBAL team is that they implemented even those necessary things that were not specified in the small list of REQUIREMENTS for the project. This fact caught my attention that they are dedicated and involved in the projects they implement.

Since I didn't have time to write every little thing in the application - and they noticed what else was needed (without me saying) and implemented it gives me confidence as if the team is my internal team.

Then what I like and it gives me the feeling of support and that I can rely on them because they communicate quickly and clearly. That's why I collaborated and I will collaborate with them - and I recommend them.

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

As I said, the team is very good and I am very happy with them. What I told them to improve is that when the team notices that some bugs are needed to fix them even if they are not urgent - they fix them - instead of asking the customer to prioritize those bugs over other features.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the processes leader in our organisation. We offer personal and professional development solutions to experts in education.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

Up until the onset of the 2020 global pandemic, we had been offering our services either face to face, either one-to-one or one-to-many, or online, in a synchronous fashion. The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly impacted the way education is done around the world, including in Romania, were we are based.

As such, it became increasingly difficult to offer personal and professional development solutions to educators. We needed a way to offer our services in an asynchronous fashion.

Fabrit Global has helped us in this regard, creating an online platform, which we can use to offer our courses and additional materials, so that our target audience can use them at their leisure, whenever they find the time and head space to do so.

SOLUTION

How did you select Fabrit Global and what were the deciding factors?

Fabrit Global has been recommended by connections whom we trust.

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

We had a kick off meeting in summer, where we brainstormed the things we wanted the platform to do, and produced sort of a mind map in that meeting.

Afterword, Fabrit Global start working on the MVP, and in October we had a fully functional online learning platform. In my organisation, I am the main liaison with Fabrit Global, because I have a global overview of our needs, as a client, in relationship with Fabrit Global.

However, my technical, programming-related knowledge base is minimal at best. What I know, regarding the technologies used, is that Microsoft Azure has been used. In the MVP-version of the online platform, we could upload and organise courses on the platform, using video files, image files, and pdf documents.

We could create extra materials on the platform, which we could associate with more than one course. We could edit the following elements for each course: name, description, materials associated with it, name and order of course modules, name and order of module elements, and introductory video, which was available to public, before buying the course on the platform.

Users could create an account and buy courses. Payments are done by integrating Stripe with our platform. Three months later, in December 2020, the platform can do many more things. It has evolved in this way because Fabrit Global has been very responsive to our requests - they have provided good solutions for our needs, and have delivered them fast.

New functions on the platform include:

1. the ability to see users in the platform

2. generating reports about courses (who accesed the course, how: full price or with discount coupon, what coupon each user has activated, payment amount, course progress, number of completed modules/course,)

3. generating user-usage reports (including name of user, email, what organisation is assigned to them, coupons used, courses accessed, courses completed)

4. assigning organisations to users, for the event in which we strike a deal with a company, wherein we offer all their employees, for instance, a discount code for specific products on our platform

5. the ability for each course author to edit their description and image, which appears in the end-user version of the platform

6. the ability to upload course-completion certificate-templates, and have them auto-fill, and send them via email through the platform,

7. to users  the ability to resend account activation email to users, or to activate them directly through the admin platform

8. we can set featured courses at the top of the course page in the platform

9. users can filter courses available by author, organisation of the author, categories, and tags

11. users have a "My Courses” page which displays the courses they have access to, means of access (type of coupon used, or full price), amount paid, course progress

12. users can choose to buy courses individually, or they can choose to purchase a one-year subscription to the platform, which offers them access to all courses on the platform

13. Users can send an e-mail to the platform's office email, which is an Outlook account, which I manage. 

14. The account was created by Fabrit Global - users receive automated emails from the platform's "noreply" email, which is also an Outlook account, also created by Fabrit Global.

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

The co-founder, Alex Faur, was one of our main points of contact, alongside two team members of Fabrit Global, which I suppose have the official role of developer.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

At the moment, we offer ten courses through the platform, and have over 800 users on the platform. The platform fully meets our expectations, and Fabrit Global continues to work on new features of the platform, as we continue to communicate our needs.

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

We used app.asana.com to have an overview regarding the tasks we needed done on the platform. We also used Gmail to communicate, and Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and Zoom to have periodic meetings in the first weeks, and now, only when we feel the need to have a longer conversation between the teams.

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

I still feel impressed with how creative Fabrit Global is in generating solutions for our needs. We just know what we need, and they come up with easy to use solutions, which are developed and deployed fast. So their flexibility and very fast delivery is also a very strong point.

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

The one thing which comes to mind, was that, when they presented the mvp, I noticed a few typos in the text in the platform. Other than that, we are very satisfied regarding our collaboration with them.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the Managing Director of Countersight. We are a cybersecurity and R&D company operating in the UK and Australia.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

Countersight engaged Fabrit early in our product development effort to provide user experience and interface expertise as a complement to the core technology that we had created.

This included providing user interfaces to allow the definition of alerting rules for anomaly detection, real-time notifications and configuration of the solution as a whole.

Our goal was to develop a user-oriented solution that can be used by any generalist IT practitioner with no prior security background, with a particular focus on small and medium sized organisation.

To achieve this we identified UI/UX design as a key capability, which is where Fabrit came in.

SOLUTION

How did you select Fabrit Global and what were the deciding factors?

We encountered Fabrit through an industry event in the UK and developed the relationship over a number of months.

In evaluating Fabrit we reviewed their previous work and talked to current and previous clients while assessing their technical competency directly though conversations with their principals and technical elads.

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

Fabrit provided the complementary software development expertise necessary to turn Countersight’s security knowledge and internal procedures into a commercial software, providing the critical user interface design experience required to make this complex system accessible for non-security specialists.

Fabrit started with business and requirements analysis, following which we began developing the key interface component required for Countersight to bring the product to market.

The platform is based around the Elastic stack, using Elasticsearch as the main datastore, with Kibana providing the basis of the analytics interface and Logstash filling the core ETL capability.

Elasticsearch is an open-source technology that can aggregate large amounts of data, returning results in a matter of a blink of the eye. It’s visual plug-in - Kibana - allows users to manipulate the data and present them in different formats.

In addition to the specific functionality required, we also worked on improving Kibana’s interface, in order to home the user experience and to make it as intuitive as possible for any type of user.

One of the key features that Fabrit implemented, and continue to iterate, is the integration with Countersight’s alerting framework, which allows real-time notification and automated analysis on activities of interestthrough the production of powerful bespoke rule configurations (e.g. detecting changes in traffic volume, blacklist-based alerting, etc.).

Our work provided a key bridge between this core capability and the user, translating the complexities of the underlying framework into an intuitive user interface, making for an user-friendly yet secure environment. Fabrit build the plug-ins using Angular.js for the front-end and Node.js for back-end.

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

We have worked primarily with two consultants from Fabrit, a project manager/account manager and a senior developer. Although we could have accessed additional developers we preferred to work with a single developer to develop a mutual understanding over time.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The complementary services provided by Fabrit helped the us to develop the product beyond a highly technical in-house tool into market-ready user-oriented software, effectively emerging as an affordable solution for network security needs.

Our product has been deployed across multiple clients sites and receives excellent feedback.

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

Project management was flexible and professional, based on a combination of informal communication combined with task management in Asana, source control and issue tracking in Bitbucket and a formal monthly reporting cycle.

We approached the work in an agile way, breaking down the project into discrete work packages and building from a base foundation upwards, allowing exploratory research work prior to final requirements definition.

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

The guys at Fabrit are a great combination of technically skilled, motivated and professional while being super flexible and easy-going.

This combination makes working with them like working with just another member of your team rather than the arduous process often involved with other development companies or consultancies.

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

No.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the CEO of SomProduct company. We are an e-commerce home&deco retailer with over 60.000 products in our portofolio. SomProduct is one of the most important e-commerce player in Romania and Poland.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

We had a real problem updating all the catalog prices in a really timely manner. It was a big challenge in SALE events like Black Friday or Cyber Monday to change the prices accordingly in couple of minutes.

SOLUTION

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

We approach Fabrit Software company and after 1 meeting we decided that we can start this project together. One of the most important factors was the team knowledge and dedication to the project.

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

They completed the first phase of the project in 2-3 months and we were really happy with the results. At that time we decided to continue the project together and add more features to it.

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

I've been in touch with Andrei F., the project manager and owner and with Adrian, a really nice guy who was always available for us, no matter the time of the day (including late hours)

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We were really happy with the results. We have saved thousands of hours changing the prices automatically using Fabrit solution.

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

We communicated through Skype and Emails. Andrei was really involved in offering a state of the art solution.

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

I really like the spirit of the company, they are young and really devoted to deliver the best solutions for their customers.

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

While the project was done perfectly i would suggest to check every new member involved in the project before assigning it to the project.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Pier Asset Management LLC is a investment manager who facilitates access to the alternative lending industry for institutional investors. Founded in 2017, the women owned and operated firm manages private funds, separately managed accounts, and custom solutions providing investors experienced fiduciary oversight in the attractive marketplace lending asset class. As the CIO, my responsibilities include overseeing all technology efforts.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Fabrit Global?

We needed an automated investment tool to increase the performance of purchasing consumer loans from the Lending Club and Prosper platforms. This would completely replace low-speed spreadsheet applications in getting and filtering listings, applying credit models, and sending orders to the platforms. Our secondary need was a data warehouse that would provide rich business-intelligence dashboards and client service reporting.

What were your goals for this project?

We did not have specific requirements. We discussed the solutions and plans in real time with them, but we were very open to their suggestions on the build.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

They were recommended by another technology partner of ours.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

They ended up building an investment platform - a distributed multi-threaded system that automatically receives and filters new listings, calculates risk using the client's algorithms, sends purchase orders, and delivers real-time investment reports from our internal database.

What was the team composition?

The entire project was managed and operated by two people. Both were well qualified for the project and had the necessary skills to complete it.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

We gained control over the entire purchasing process. The order-fill ratio increased by at least 50%, which was well above our target expectations. Additionally, the data warehouse and visual graphics tools work seamlessly and in an auto-mated form.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

We communicated primarily via Skype chat and Skype calls throughout, though other tools were available for monitoring.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

The small team allowed them to be quick and nimble. There were no delays and bugs could almost be handled in real time.

Are there any areas for improvement?

I wish we had prepared better contractually around the on-going servicing as it become a bit of a gray area once the project was done and support began. But, that's as much our fault as theirs.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Our company is a global engineering, design and project management consultancy. Our team provides bespoke software solutions to clients, primarily in the Oil & Gas sector and I am the team / technical lead for these services.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Fabrit Global?

Our client required a bespoke environment for managing risk assessments and inspections for Oil & Gas assets. This had to be developed in line with their requirements and within a tight delivery schedule. We hired the Fabrit team to work as an extension of our internal team to develop the solution by working closely together.

What were your goals for this project?

Develop a suitable software solution for our end client in line with their requirements and within the time and budget constraints.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

I have known the team for a long time and knew that they would be a perfect fit with our own team, integrating smoothly and being capable of delivering a high-quality software under the envisaged time frame. We considered a variety of options, ranging from other internal teams in different parts of the business to local software providers, but decided that the skills, mindset and quality that the Fabrit team would bring were the best fit for that scenario.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

They worked closely with me to develop a modern web-based application that would allow our clients to manage risk assessments and inspections across their entire fleet of assets and disciplines. Our approach is to work closely with our clients, so I handled that interaction and identified all the requirements and translated those into functionality for the software. We worked on the architecture, design and implementation of the system together, as a combined team despite being located in two different countries. Fabrit also completed an independent testing of the final software to ensure it works as expected prior to deployment. I handled the documentation, deployment and ongoing maintenance of the solution.

What was the team composition?

Our team consisted of two software developers and one software architect from Fabrit and me as the lead developer, business analyst and project manager. Fabrit also provided a software tester for the testing phase of the project.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

The project was extremely successful, delivered on time and budget despite the tight schedule with the end clients providing great feedback on the quality, usability and efficiency of the developed web application. The initial scope of work was targeted at one discipline, but we have since developed another 3 disciplines, building on our relationship with Fabrit and using the same approach for delivery.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

We worked together as a combined team, collaborating constantly over Skype, with daily conversations about tasks, requirements and solutions to any identified problems. We used Microsoft Azure DevOps to maintain our code base and development tasks. I handled the project management aspects of the project with the Fabrit software architect providing local support and guidance to the team. The Fabrit team was working remotely, with a 2-hour time difference, but the entire collaboration was excellent and there were no issues or concerns related to the time difference.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

The people - Fabrit has some excellent people that care about delivering the best solutions to their clients and are always up to date with the latest technologies. Collaborating with them on a daily basis was effective, successful and really fun. Their quality and attention to detail speak for themselves in the feedback we get from the end users.

Are there any areas for improvement?

Nothing I can think of as an immediate area for improvement - sure, there are always things to improve when you have to keep up with the latest technology, but the team is already providing services to a really high standard.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Societe Generale European Business Services was founded as a service center for the Societe Generale Group. The company provides high-quality professional services in various fields of activity to Group entities around the world (finance / accounting, procurement, human resources, IT and Know Your Customer). I lead the accounts payable team.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Fabrit Global?

The project started as an idea within an internal program for entrepreneurs. After the idea validation,the project received an investment for developing a platform that, on one hand will help companies prevent duplicate payments in their accounts payable process and on the other hand, to reduce the effort of duplicate payments control by using an AI solutions. We needed a partner that has the necessary experience in developing web applications to help us building this solution from scratch.

What were your goals for this project?

The main objective was to create a user friendly platform that can integrate a custom-made AI algorithms which can be easily deployed to potential customers.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

We had several criteria based on which we evaluate the offers received. Beside the price and the experience, we were interested to work with someone that can be a reliable partner, to understand the problem that we want to solve and to propose adapted solutions, in a short period of time. Also, none of us (SG EBS project team) had technical background, so we appreciated a lot the fact that they had an experienced BA that adapted the vocabulary for us in order to understand what will be the best technical solution. The decision was taken also based on their team composition, and an important point was that they have internal ML/AI capabilities.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

This project had as an objective to develop a web platform powered by a custom-made AI, to be used by large companies, like Societe Generale, for avoiding duplicate payments. We started working together in August 2018 and the delivery of the MVP was set to be in October. The collaboration with Fabrit started with a few days’ workshop at their office, with a software architect and business analyst. They went through all requirements, understood the business and created dataflows and diagrams to make sure we all have the same final expectations.

Fabrit was in charge of the development for the whole platform: the MVP, which was developed in time for our deadline, the front end, based on mockups created by our UX partner, the back end, the infrastructure in Microsoft Azure, and the integration with the ML algorithm that was built with a different partner. Once the development has finalized, Fabrit has provided monthly support, with high availability and quick response times.

What was the team composition?

The project team (SG EBS and Fabrit) was composed from:

1. Me, as a business representative and as a PM
2. BA, Alex Faur which is also the Co-Founder of Fabrit
3. 4 full stack developers, from which one was is charge with the integration of the AI algorithm

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

The platform was successfully implemented and it is used today by Societe Generale to avoid duplicate payments for their worldwide accounts payable process.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

With the help of Fabrit we established all the features that needed to be developed and based on this we organized the project on sprints of 2 weeks. After each sprint we had a demo, tests and a retrospective. Working like that it helped us to have an MVP ready to be deployed to customers in only 2 months with the most important features.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Their involvement and ability to understand quickly want we wanted as a solution. Plus, the fact that, once they understood our challenges, they came with several solutions and recommendations based on their experiences.

Are there any areas for improvement?

By the time we started the project, they had no UX & UI design capabilities inhouse as we expected, just external collaborators. Recently, they added a new member to the team to cover the UX & UI design side as well. Offering this to their leads will help them a lot in their projects.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Hawkins\Brown are an internationally-renowned award winning practice of over 250 architects, interior designers, urban designers and researchers. I work within the Digital Design Team. We work on the implementation of new technologies at Hawkins\Brown through Computational BIM \ Design Revit app development and more recently software development.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Fabrit Global?

We originally worked with Fabrit to develop a web tool, That would allow us to visually represent area briefing data to our clients in a engaging and visual way. Traditionally such information has been shown only in spread sheet form and it is difficult for clients to meaningfully compare the area data of their brief compared to other Hawkins\Brown projects.

This required full back end and front end development. Fabrit worked with the Internal team to mock up and front end before developing it, Since this original Project, we have worked with Fabrit on an additional 4 projects across a range of topics.

What were your goals for this project?

To develop a online platform to access area briefing data for each of our clients. Provide a scaleable back end. so we could add new metric to the data base. For example our latest project with Fabrit we are measuring the embodied carbon of our building and access this information through the same web portal

Create a visually engaging front end to display information to our clients that is otherwise hidden in spread sheets. To demonstrate to our clients that we are looking to develop new and innovate ways to deliver our services to them. Also to unlock new opportunities through the development of such platforms.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

We selected to work with Fabrit for a number of reasons.

• They were recommended by one of our consultants.
• We tendered to multiple software developers. Ultimately Fabrit returned what we considered to be the most suitable return.
• Not being based in London makes their fee highly competitive, and they were happy to travel to us to ensure we could have face to face meeting when required.
• We enjoyed meeting Alex and felt that he and his company suited the type of team we like to work with at Hawkins\Brown.

Open to dialogue and happy to involve us in the development process. Since then we have built a great relationship with Fabrit and continued to work with them, having recently appointed them to undertake a forth project with us.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

Fabrit have provided a range of services to us across the 4 projects we have worked on.

• integration with internal login permissions through active directory
• Full software architecture and engineering services.
• UX design for web based projects.
• Service level agreement. to provide a support service for all tools developed by Fabrit.
• For each project we have provided Fabrit with a brief and mock ups when required.
• They have then returned a proposal breaking the project down into key stages.

What was the team composition?

Internally the teams have consisted of 2-3 people, one of which being the project lead. At Fabrit each project has always had a projects lead and a development team that would change size depending on the work load. We would primarily communicate with the project lead. If there was a individual task a developer was working on we would liaise with them directly through Asana.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

Fabrit has worked with us to create inward facing tools as well as clients facing tools, the impact of which are quite different.

Inward facing: Fabrit have developed applications that have helped to streamline a number of applications, from software deployment to archiving of completed projects. Each of which have had provided substantial time saving compared to our existing workflow.

Our outward facing projects have allowed us to provide new services to our clients in ways that would not typically be delivered by an architectural practice. Because of this we have won a number of projects as we can demonstrate to our clients that we are approaching problems in new ways.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

All projects have been managed through the web based project management platform Asana. tasks are broken down and assigned to a developer. We can then easily communicate with the team and there is a history of all information we have discussed on a project. When required projects have also been managed on GitHub.

This is great for us as budding developers as we are able to see and learn from the work being developed. Alex has always made visits to the office when required. We have also made a visit to their office to spend time and learn from the team, which was a great experience. There has been no issues faced with the development team being offshore.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

From spending time at their office with the full team, it was evident that its a team of talented individual. Fabrit has been more than happy to invite us into their office, to work along side and learn from them. This is something that not a lot of firms would be willing to do.

Are there any areas for improvement?

Fabrit have always been open to improvement or suggestion improvements to us if they felt like they could better their own services. Such as moving to the management platform asana. So we could have more overview and involvement in the development process.