Hvantage Technologies Inc

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the director of IT for Standard Beverage, a privately held, Kansas-based wholesale distributor of wines, spirits, and beer. We are the largest distributor in our area. I orchestrate our application infrastructure, making sure our position is adequate relative to our competition.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Hvantage?

We had developed a basic e-commerce platform that gave customers access to information and allowed them to perform self-fulfillments. The website lacked functionality, so we needed a partner to fill those gaps.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Hvantage made some changes to our existing platform. Our biggest goal was to make it easier to navigate and make it responsive on mobile devices. Their team is quite good at figuring out business logic, and they introduced some creative ideas for our UI.

The biggest gap we filled was creating a new module for customers and sales reps. We implemented a feature for sample ordering and integrated it completely with our backend. Our applications are built on an SQL database using SAP.NET.

We created the wireframes, specs, and database design internally. Hvantage executed those specs closely, but they did push back when they identified design flaws.

What is the team composition?

Their project manager was my main contact. He was available if I needed to escalate an issue and didn’t have immediate access to the developers. The next contact in line was their senior developer, followed by the developer who performed 80% of the work. He took the lead on mobile responsiveness and other advanced functionalities. Hvantage also brought in a designer who ensured consistency across browsers.

How did you come to work with Hvantage?

They were highly recommended to me by a friend who had used them in the past. Since I preferred to have a referral from someone with firsthand experience, I asked him for a company that could help us elevate our existing e-commerce system.

How much have you invested with them?

The cost of their services has been $50,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Hvantage in the beginning of 2017. Our first large project, the sample ordering system, went into production in October of that year. We have continued to add functionalities since then.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We are trying to remove some strain and resource requirements from our customer service department. The platform is also a fantastic way for us to share information—such as pricing and invoicing data—that would normally be obtained by reaching out to our sales or customer service representatives. 

Hvantage’s work has been instrumental. They have based new functionalities on ideas from internal sales representatives and customers. We have a built-in feedback form where people can request enhancements. The constant communication between our internal team and customers—along with Hvantage’s involvement—has led to a solution that works for our end-users. We can give them access to the information they want.

We have implemented tools that aid pricing requests. When a customer opens the pricing information page to create an order, the site will connect to our backend system in real-time, retrieving current and past orders and establishing a trend from the customer’s perspective.

Hvantage helped us build a solution that is leveraged by almost a third of our customers.

How did Hvantage perform from a project management standpoint?

We had a roadmap of features, but the work was done in an ad-hoc manner. They did a great job of remaining agile and changing directions. As a small company, we and our partners need to be nimble.

Hvantage is the first offshore resource we’ve used, so we had a learning period. We have a large time difference, but they’ve been more than willing to accommodate us whenever we needed to schedule a call or meeting on our time. For the most part, contacting someone from their end wasn’t a challenge. They made sure to review our status and address any issues.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Hvantage provided a solution that worked for both parties. They worked with me whenever I had a suggestion or recommendation from either a development or a partnership perspective, whether in terms of contract agreements, billable hours, or something else. I’ve been very happy with their ability to work with me and come up with fair adjustments.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They can put together amazing business logic and backend functionalities, but Hvantage’s design work could improve.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

Advisors Asset Management is four different companies. We sell a variety of '40 Act and fixed income products to institutional clients, as well as other independent broker-dealers and registered investment advisors. I'm the managing director of trading and risk.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Hvantage?

The scope of their work was to create a BI (business intelligence) environment for the firm.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We have a very complex production data environment that's been built over 25 years. It's pretty expansive and had three big benchmarks.

The first thing we did is reverse-engineer that environment into a new production environment, which includes a full-blown SQL formal production environment that’s Microsoft product-based. Instead of a highly normalized environment, it was set up and modeled for BI.

The second part was to spool up the Power BI platform, which is a new product for Microsoft, including each of the components with the combination of the desktop, web services, and the phone app.

The third part was to create a new web environment that combined both highly customized solutions and a bunch of complex calculations, and also leveraged the Azure cloud as well as the Power BI embedded component. This allows you to create these data- and visual-rich solutions that can be monitored in real-time and then publish into your own web environment.

First of all, the data was really complex, so to reverse-engineer that took an enormous effort. Then to start operating out of the Power BI platform—which is very new—it didn't really stabilize for a year. We were about six months into it when we started developing it. Then they had to take all of that and have it operate in our own web environment using some of the embedded components that Microsoft offers through Azure.

Not a lot of people had done this. We had to solve for all sorts of issues, how to control the API, and program around different things. They're constantly evolving it, and it's evolving very rapidly. A lot of things that we developed, they actually came out with a few months later.

How did you come to work with Hvantage?

I worked with Krishna Baderia at Countrywide. We built a very large and sophisticated commercial real estate platform. This was a platform where we had 200 people, 15 offices, a billion dollars a month in production, and $200 million in revenue. It involved all sorts of complex financial engineering/modeling. It had very large positions: our average derivative position was $8 billion, and loans and bonds were something like $3 billion to $3.5 billion.

This is a company that we built. We went from $0 to $200 million in three and a half years. We were working 12 to 14 hours a day. My partner and I built these tools from scratch, mostly coding really sophisticated Excel spreadsheets. We needed these tools to be on a better platform with formal code, certainly something that was compiled, because it was doing a ton of work involving really complex calculations.

Krishna came to work, and he was our sole resource. Without any formal training (compared to us with a lot of years of experience, advanced knowledge, and advanced math degrees), he was able to do all of it with almost no assistance, which is crazy good. He took all of that and put it into a formal production model, coded it in C, and did all sorts of connectivity from simple services, web services, and APIs. Basically, he took our highly functioning prototype tools and put it into a secure production environment. He was able to do that. He certainly got a lot of help from us, but he was able to advance the ball on his own and figure stuff out at a rate that was really special. He instantly became one of our favorite people of all time.

So when he started Hvantage, he contacted me. I tried to hire him at my former firm, but I didn't have a spot and I already had a full team. I build trading desks and manage tradings, but I also help with a lot of strategic initiatives and with building business startups. Inevitably, that requires building out some interesting technology. When I came here and I had an opportunity, he was the first person I called.

How much have you invested with Hvantage?

It was about $20,000 a month.

What is the status of this engagement?

The contract is a year and a half old now. It's ongoing. They've been tremendous at figuring it out and finding a way to accomplish all the things. It sounds like a simple scope, but the product is this really sophisticated website that is getting sales and trading information throughout the day about what their customers are doing and opportunities that they have. We're now evolving a fully-integrated solution to do the round trip ticketing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

It's too early to tell. The first thing I did was develop a sophisticated risk management system which allowed us to really change the complexion of how the firm trades. The second thing was to supply tremendous insight into the current business. That allowed us to point the machine—the ship—in various directions. The last thing, or the most recent evolution, was what I call the portal. It is the third evolution—I have about three more to go from here, and that's for the sales guys.

The feedback has been really positive. Since we've been working on it, our business is up by 50%. We have four big strategic initiatives, and this is one of them. All four of them have contributed to the increase in revenue, but I think all four working together did the trick.

How did Hvantage perform from a project management standpoint?

I challenged them to operate not in extreme Agile, but in hyper-extreme Agile. This is something that is near and dear to me, as I just made it up. What you do daily is break it, build it, and deploy it—you just do it until your fingers bleed. The reason for that is I already have a full-time job. I am a part of the senior management team, and I manage half the trading desk and manage all the risk. It was the only way that I figured you could get through the material because this is a data platform that has been developed over 20 years. They took that challenge on and have done great.

What did you find most impressive about Hvantage?

We're still not doing sprints or anything like that, but their ability to get up to speed with the idea and help me prioritize and execute in a very compartmentalized way, while still having a highly functioning platform, is really terrific. It’s just hard to do.

Are there any areas Hvantage could improve?

I can't think of anything. Realize that these things are new. They'd be new to anybody because Power BI is a new product and process. I feel like any of the things that I wish we’d done differently were totally on me. I may have spent a little more time on the data model. At the end of the day, I think we did the right thing. We solved for it, and now we're able to provide a very robust data model, handling millions of rows while still being efficient. I think they've done a great job. I really do.