Incipient Corp.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Co-Founder of a beverage company

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Full-line beverage brand

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Incipient Corp. to accomplish?

• Enable EDI transmissions of orders from Customer to Warehouses
• Replace an aging existing software
• Streamline processes, forecasting and inventory control

SOLUTION

How did you find Incipient Corp.?

Business Conference

Why did you select Incipient Corp. over others?

• High ratings
• Close to my geographic location
• Pricing fit our budget

How many teammates from Incipient Corp. were assigned to this project?

Not Sure they kept changing

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

• Develop an order, inventory and raw materials tracking system for our beverage brand. 
• National distributor and contract warehouses had EDI compliance mandates which we were to satisfy. 
• Allow for full raw materials tracking to hone in on true production costs. 
• Minimize data entry to prevent key errors. 
• Order tracking from entry to every stage until payment. 
• Fine tune reporting for sales commissions, trend analysis and bottle deposits compliance.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

On-time EDI compliance. Being able to use before our company relocation in April 2022. Replace aging existing system and integrating into Quickbooks to prevent double data entries.

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

In November 2020, I started working closely with Amit on expectations and needs of the interface. Since the developers were in India, meetings needed to be very early in the morning which didn't always work well with my schedule, but it was manageable. We met once per week on zoom to fine tune and come up with a finish date of April 1, 2022 in advance of our corporate relocation to allow our old servers to be offline during the move. 

Development started shortly thereafter on the order entry flow and finalizing the system generated documents (Order conf, BOL, Invoices, PO). Shortly thereafter in subsequent demos, I noticed that the documents I was seeing were not the ones we approved. When questioned, I was informed that they were "lost" during a system update and had to be redone. Scary. This process took even longer the second time and I felt like very little time and attention was given to this project. 

Next step was Quickbooks integration where we just needed payments to be recorded for deposit and a few simple journal entries. On demo, I learned that they were working on an entirely different version than I had and that the work was not transferable. Not sure why they didn't confirm the version prior to starting. So we tabled that for the time-being as that was not a must-have for initial launch and deadline was quick approaching and EDI testing has not even started yet. 

In September 2022 (note: 5 months PAST DEADLINE) EDI testing had just began. Meanwhile, I was already past the compliance deadline with my warehouse and had to do an additional manual entry into their system since we were not ready with EDI. Testing on both the customer and warehouse end went poorly with connection issues, problem with the file data integrity, etc. Both contacts told me that Incipient seemed inexperienced with EDI and I might want to entertain a third party. 

At more than one point, connection became very unstable and was causing errors in their system and they terminated our connection. In December 2022, I was informed that Amit was going on vacation and Bryan would be working with me in the interim. This was fine as I had spoken with Bryan before and he was very nice. I didn't hear from Amit for another whole year until I demanded to speak with him. I thought he left the company, but apparently he was still there and just moved the project to Bryan without letting me know.

We set another deadline of April 1, 2023 (a full year late) in advance of my tradeshow travel season. All this time, I had not seen a single report ready despite the samples being provided in 2020. Needless to say, April 2023 DEADLINE MISSED. Since this project has dragged on so long, specs had changed, data has changed and the contacts we were working with changed too....so lots of starting over. 

After Incipient was incorrectly transmitting customer invoices (810) to my warehouse with confidential customer info on it in August 2023 along with other major issues and delays, I gave them the chance to bow out gracefully of this project as obviously it wasn't in their wheelhouse. I had a Jan 2024 firm EDI deadline with my National Distributor coming and couldn't afford to get delisted due to non-compliance. Bryan assured me that they were close and would bring additional assets in to be ready for my October travel schedule. 

Once again, DEADLINE MISSED. I explained how high the stakes are for us here and I get a few emails between 4 and 5am on some days of things that were done wrong or halfway and no response all day long....like everyone has other full time jobs and doing this as a side gig. I don't know at this point. To date 1/2/2024 we are still not live, we had 5 orders from 12/28 just disappear with no explanation given, my suppliers and carriers have been sent false orders, I have 6 points of functionality still not done. Some EDI forms were not even tested until Dec 2023 and boy, did they come in wrong. 

We have given up on Quickbooks integration, raw material tracking and so many other components we were counting on. Meanwhile, Feb 9th we get delisted from our supplier and Bryan assured me it was safe to sign the commitment letter. By March 1st, we will be out of business thanks to Incipient.

What was your primary form of communication with Incipient Corp.?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

I thought that the agreeably and ease to work with was great and I really like both Amit and Bryan, however they are completely unable to deliver on their promises.

Are there any areas for improvement or something Incipient Corp. could have done differently?

They need to honor deadlines, respond quicker to messages, check that something is actually correct/complete before telling customer it's complete. They should stay away from projects requiring EDI as both ends had problems with them. My warehouse has set up EDI with hundreds of companies and my distributor with thousands and Incipient failed on both levels.