Fakir Technology Consultants GmbH

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the innovation manager for a middle-size Industry company that is responsible for competitors' intelligence.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Fakir Technology Consultants GmbH, and what were your goals?

We wanted to evaluate if we can create some knowledge out for the yearly reports of our competitors in an automated way. For this task we had to explore the technical possibilities and also implement a usable application in our cloud systems.

SOLUTION

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

The Fakir team implemented a complete web application for us, fetched the reports as PDFs, transferred them into a sizeable scaled database and processed them using the latest text-mining algorithms (NLP, Haystack). Then the data was visualized for our competitor intelligence team.

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

The deliverables were a fully deployed web application ready to use, together with some example reports and tests for the NLP part. As for technology, Fakir recommended us to use the latest web technologies. As far as I know, they used haystack for the text mining, which was done with the Python programming language.

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

The team consists out for 4 developers, one NLP expert and the very nice project manager Tim. Thank you for your support.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We do not yet have measurable outcomes. So far I can only judge the timeline. We had an optimistic and pessimistic case. Fakir delivered 1 month later than the optimistic case, which was a very positive experience for us. I have to tell, that this only worked thanks to Tim who did bring together all pieces really well.

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

The project management was done completely by Fakir. We described the requirements in two workshops and got monthly reports during the engineering time. It was great how self-organized they worked, but also I am used to being more involved in specific tasks. Maybe something to be improved on in the future.

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

For me personally, it was the interaction and pragmatism of CEO Simon. Whatever topic we had, he came up directly with solutions. While we usually negotiate a lot with our suppliers, he formed a "just do it" culture. Very much appreciated.

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

The only thing we might want to improve is the language gap. Most engineers are English speaking, while our company works still a lot in German. In my role, I translated parts, but German to German would be easier for us.