INK Solutions

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Director of a manufacturing company

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Bespoke Software development

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire INK Solutions to accomplish?

• Java Bespoke Development
• Migration from legacy systems
• Setup tests via Jenkins

SOLUTION

How did you find INK Solutions?

Upwork

Why did you select INK Solutions over others?

• High ratings
• Pricing fits our budget
• Great culture fit
• Company values aligned

How many teammates from INK Solutions were assigned to this project?

1 Employee

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

Migration of legacy locker booking site with complex backend to Java spring boot MVC using flyway and PostgresSQL.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Migration was complex and it was from a Nosql system with enhancements. Jenkins was setup to test the backend.

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

They went above and beyond to provide us with a great service. Ivan was always responsive and project was delivered on time.

What was your primary form of communication with INK Solutions?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

Ivan has investment banking background which makes him a very valuable asset as a Java developer.

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

Everything went as planned.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am CTO at Quickget, 10 minutes delivery service for daily essential products and groceries.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire INK Solutions?

We wanted to manage and improve our tech Infrastructure

SOLUTION

How did you select INK Solutions and what were the deciding factors?

We interviewed and shortlisted 5 companies. the primary selection factors were professionalism, knowledge, and experience.

Describe the project in detail and walk through their service package.

We have 3 platforms, consumer-facing, driver-facing and warehouse-facing. so we wanted to manage the infrastructure as well as migrate it to terraform

How many resources from the INK Solutions team worked with you, and what were their positions?

I have working only with the founder of this company

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

The result was great, we successfully migrated our project to terraform as well as we improved the speed and quality of our infrastructure. also they provided great documentations.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

We used to do a weekly call to prioritize weekly tasks and get a follow back on last week's tasks.

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

The team's recommendations and suggestions are excellent.

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

sometimes availability was an issue but just for a short time.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the CTO of Self Storage company in Canada, we have over 16 locations across Canada.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire INK Solutions, and what were your goals?

We needed an online solution to market and sell Self Storage units, along with providing customer pickup and delivery of their belongings, INK was part of the project since the beginning and helped on architecting, developing and also site-management of the products and services. Our goal was to design a solution that has very low friction on customer experience and improves our online sales.

SOLUTION

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

We needed a team with great experience and knowledge in different types of technologies, a team that can be trustable with a large project, a team that is committed to understand the requirements of the customer, a team willing to work on the customers time zone and schedules, a team thats able to work with the customer and solve problems. So INK was really good all of the above requirements.

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

We needed to build a multi-tiered web based application to support the online sales of our Self Storage and Door-Door service, along with Bin Rental and Document Storage service for our Self Storage business. We needed a technology that is fault tolerant, scalable, and able to adapt to new technology and business services. We needed to come with a good design and architecture, along with several meetings with the key stake holders to identify all the requirements and user journey.

We needed to collaborate with several business entities including Stripe, Google, Data Dog, Amazon, etc. The technologies we used were Java for backend, and React JS for front end, we used AWS elastic cloud service for hosting and all other dev ops and security related things as well. Deliverables included weekly deliveries of development, managed using JIRA and Confluence for tracking key items for delivery.

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

We had about 2-3 people working with us initially for the first 5 months, the key roles were:

• enterprise architect
• senior developer
• business analyst

Later on the project we had another front end developer to help complete the Admin Tool / CRM portal.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We are happy that we were able to finish the first phase of the project in 4 months that is the initial release of a full working product. We had a major UI/UX overhaul and several additional component of the product developed in Phase 2 which was completed in another 3 months, and in Phase 3 we were able to included some legacy backend back office integration which lasted for another 3 months, and currently we are progressing well on our Phase 4 work that includes the document storage as a service to our business.

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

We had weekly sprints using JIRA/ Confluence to track the items and progress, we had two meeting every week to track progress and identify and show stoppers, and other blockers. We used google hangout, Skype, Slack for communications. We had slack channels for day-day items and communication, also slack integrated to with bitbucket for build related alert tracking.

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

They are very attentive and focused on grasping the fine details of our requirements. They were willing to spend time and understand the needs of the customer, and attention to the requirements. they had meeting to further discuss and even they helped with researching some key business elements, and processes. They were then able to design and develop the solution without having to re-do and re-work functions. They delivered on time, and helped with deployment to Dev, and production.

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

I think that given the situation that we all work remotely and different time zone if they were here in person working with us it would have given us tremendous advantage, but that is not something that can happen easily. Other than that i dont think there is any key areas for improvement, they are doing a fantastic job!