Industrie Reply

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

ENEL X provides energy services. I specifically develop digital solutions for the storage market at ENEL X.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Industrie Reply?

We engaged Industrie to increase the number of software engineers available to us.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Primarily, Industrie augments our software and other development teams. They insert people with the correct skillsets into our different teams. We primarily work on AWS technology, and their team works in Java, Python, and R.

What is the team composition?

We’ve had up to 16–17 people from their team working on our projects. I have two main points of contact at Industrie Reply.

How did you come to work with Industrie Reply?

ENEL X is an Italian multinational corporation, so it’s helpful to have a vendor with a branch in Italy like Industrie Reply. It was easy to coordinate the purchase and establish communication channels with them.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent about $4 million on our work with them.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together around July 2020, and the partnership’s ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Industrie’s team has good skillsets, which is the primary measure of success. They’re able to bring people with the right skills into our projects. That’s important. Our team has been satisfied with the work Industrie has done so far.

How did Industrie Reply perform from a project management standpoint?

As this is primarily staff augmentation, we manage the projects. They handled one project, and we were happy with them. There have been no problems with their communication or ability to meet deadlines.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Industrie finds the right people for us. They’re great at making the right talent available to us. Our company has an international presence, so it’s important to us that Industrie’s flexible with practices too.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, they just need to keep up the conversations with our teams across the company.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Spend preliminary time to gauge the scope of work. It can take time to make sure you’re finding the right person from the development unit in Industrie.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the director of digital product engineering for a large equipment manufacturing company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Industrie Reply?

We needed help in developing our CRM and e-commerce platforms for our B2B and B2C clients. The platform will allow our dealers — who are the ones working with our equipment with their customers — to set up vehicles and purchase services for the end customer.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Industrie Reply came in with expertise in CRM, and they helped us set up our CRM platform on Microsoft Dynamics. They helped us drive our business cases and identify requirements. They also helped our development team. 

Our company provided most of the requirements for building the CRM. Industrie Reply helped us understand their requirements by going through their user journey and their expectations. They placed everything together in a way that would make sense for both of us. We then went into developing the app. 

Industrie Reply was also involved in operations, not just in development. This means production support for the platform they were building, but that had a separate budget. They provided support to our end users 24 hours a day, five days a week, with teammates across the U.S. and Italy.

We had other stakeholders, and we were connected to their systems. Industrie Reply helped us engage with those stakeholders and drive our requirements and needs. They worked with six other larger external systems such as SAP, business intelligence, IoT platforms, and similar systems. 

What is the team composition?

They had business-facing consultants and technical resources, which were deployed across North America and Italy. There were 20–25 people in the beginning, but we reduced the size later.

How did you come to work with Industrie Reply?

Like us, Industrie Reply is also headquartered in Italy. They had been working for my company and had finished the first phase of the development before I came onto the project. I was engaged to help Industrie Reply complete the remaining phases and deliver the work. 

How much have you invested with them?

We spent around $1 million–$5 million on the project.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our engagement with Industrie Reply lasted from May 2017–June 2020. The project is ongoing, but we’re working with different partners now.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Industrie Reply helped us deliver around 20 core business use cases, and each use case had its own lifecycle and involved a lot of work. On a large scale, those use cases will drive the B2C and B2B platforms with the CRM and e-commerce services that the team had built. 

How did Industrie Reply perform from a project management standpoint?

Industrie Reply’s project management was good. They’re solid in putting the right teams in place, managing scope, and using agile methodologies to deliver in small batches. They had an account manager based in North America and another in Italy that came later. The people involved in North America were in a separate office not too far from our location. The key teammates involved with us were the project manager and technical lead, and they took care of the engagement with their European teammates so we didn’t have to work with multiple people.  

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their well-rounded team spread between North America and Europe was helpful for us since we were also globally distributed. Additionally, they had steady resources, and they weren’t losing people in the middle of the project. They were really committed to the deliverables, as well as its documentation.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Larger companies like us are looking for top-tier consulting companies that can support development operations across multiple areas, not just CRM. Industrie Reply is a growing company, and they can broaden their services across various verticals, industries, systems, and applications. This will allow them to support larger projects. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Industrie Reply was already excellent even when they only focused on Europe, but they had become better as they expanded in North America. Be clear on your business needs, but don’t just provide a list of requirements. Involve their team as you define your needs — this will give them a better understanding of where the requirement comes from and what value it brings to the business. 

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am the VP of operations of an international organization based in Rome that builds smart chargers for electric vehicles. We went from being a literal garage startup to becoming an international company in a very short time.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Industrie Reply?

We needed Industrie Reply’s help was because we came from managing the business with no systems other than spreadsheets. Now we have a very sophisticated SAP system where we needed to hook everything up.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Our electronic data interchange (EDI) is important to us because our customers send their orders electronically. We were moving our production to Mexico and setting up a 3PL, or third-party logistics, where all of our shipments would come out of a contracted warehouse 12 miles away from our corporate office. 

It became very clear that, on the demand side and on the fulfillment side, there was a need for an easy solution. Our colleagues in Rome had already been developing a system, but Industrie Reply stepped in to combine the EDI with all the transactions. They then hooked it up to two different legacy systems to make everything more seamless.

The first thing their team did was to conduct a gap analysis, where they quickly figured out where we were and what development work they needed to do to reach our goals. The architecture was put in place, proposed, and bid on. 

When our colleagues in Rome felt that everything looked good, we went charging down the path to start implementation, which I was very much involved with. Industrie Reply ran the gamut and made sure that, through the system, APIs, and hooks, nothing would be shipped incorrectly or to the wrong address, which was critical. 

Six months into implementation, our colleagues shifted gears and made other projects a priority, so we had to be put on the back burner. 

What is the team composition?

We work with two people: Jason (Associate Partner & Head of Customer Experience), who ran the entire project, and Alessia (Senior Consultant), who is very fluent in Italian and did more of the nuts and bolts kind of work.

How did you come to work with Industrie Reply?

We came to work with Industrie Reply by corporate recommendation. I presented my needs to a certain group in the company, and they found the perfect team to help us with the integration. They were then assigned to me after the IT departments in Rome and in North America selected them.

How much have you invested with them?

So far, we’ve invested $150,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our partnership began in November 2019. Our project is on hold due to the corporate team changing the goalposts.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

At the first launch, Industrie Reply met every one of the project milestones. Certain pieces of code had to be written by a certain date, and their team was very good at taking control of that. Their team was able to write the special codes that made the different systems connect seamlessly. They changed the parameters of one of those systems and manage the backend hooks alongside our corporate IT people. 

Although the project got delayed, through no fault of Industrie Reply, they were adaptable and able to roll with the punches. 

How did Industrie Reply perform from a project management standpoint?

Jason headed the project and coordinated the meetings with our 3PL service providers, which I found helpful since I didn’t have the time to do so myself. They were very good at controlling the meetings and keeping them on time. Everybody was productive, with Industrie Reply following through on action items.

We used Microsoft Teams to conduct conference calls and stay in touch with each other on a regular basis. Industrie Reply also came up with basic reports based on an agreed-upon checklist. Their project management wasn’t overdone. I didn’t need flowery presentations, just the nuts and bolts of the work, which they were good at delivering. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

What surprised me more than anything else was how adept and skilled Industrie Reply was. Jason, in particular, navigated through the red tape politics and the bureaucracy, doing presentations to a review board of multiple people in Rome. He excelled despite there being a language barrier situation. They were very adaptable, especially as my corporate team members began to make changes.

I was very impressed with their ability to describe a complex project in layman’s terms. The team knew about the industry standards for EDI and understood that it was critical that the system worked right down to the shipping clerk’s end. More than anything, I trusted Jason and Alessia’s reassessments every time we had to hit the reset button. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

The thing I lamented the most was that we were no longer able to get together in person as COVID-19 hit. I personally like being able to engage with somebody in person, and before the pandemic, we would be hashing things out in a physical conference room instead of over video chats. Other than that, though I don’t think there’s anything for them to improve.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Industrie Reply presents themselves very professionally, and the two people I worked with were very good. Since I have a level of trust with them, my advice is to talk to Jason and nobody else.