Kaspon Techworks Pvt. Ltd.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

Bsharp Sales Enablers is a 3-year-old company which provides products for sales enablement.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Kaspon Techworks?

Our product is aimed at sales people across different types of markets. We needed to develop our sales enablement applications and outsourced a part of our sales and software development to Kaspon Techworks.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Kaspon Techworks has worked on two different pieces: an iOS-based mobile app for our core platform, and a web application for another business challenge on behalf of a client.

Our client is a hardware vendor which needed to do two things with their demo PCs: monitor their uptime (which was linked to the commissions received by the retailers), and play specific videos during specific points in time, creating a coherent customer experience across the country. We have a C# client-side application which installs on PCs, as well as a backend application which gathers data and provides analytics. All these details flow back into the server PHP/MySQL application, which collects it and provides analytics to different people in the PC company. Reports are hierarchical, in the sense that the country manager will see country reports, and so on.

Kaspon Techworks was involved with the customer from a business perspective, and we worked with their team from a tech perspective. We went through a complete development cycle, determining the required features and taking their HTML designs to the customer for approval. We went through the software architecture, assessing how different modules would interact, and went through the hardware architecture in terms of how the server would be set up, how we would handle scalability, and so on. We used Amazon Web Services, which we optimized for the various issues the customer would be facing. We went through an entire product and architecture definition process and held a daily workshop with Kaspon Techworks in order to ensure that they were meeting customer expectations.

Post roll-out, they continued to maintain the application for us, and have been involved in its retail implementation. Their people actually visit outlets and engage with the implementation of the product. It is a large implementation, with around 2,000 terminals running at any given point in time. Kaspon Techworks has built a scalable and complex application. They also continue to provide program and analytics support for the customer.

I estimate that there were 3–4 people from Kaspon Techworks’ team involved from a software development perspective, and also an HTML designer and a project manager.

How did you come to work with Kaspon Techworks?

Their business developer was a colleague of mine in a different job, and we trusted the company to be available throughout the lifecycle of the project. Kaspon Techworks also works in an Agile way, and project scopes are not completely locked down to us. Especially for projects like the one I described, which has 2,000 running instances and requires different types of skills, we needed a partner who could walk with us through the journey and whom we trusted in terms of competence and stability. Kaspon Techworks has stood out in terms of tech capabilities, relationship management, and stability. We don’t partner with too many organizations, but Kaspon is definitely one of them.

How much have you invested with Kaspon Techworks?

The cost of their work has been $3,000 per month on average, over the course of 18 months.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Kaspon Techworks in September or October 2015. We continue to work with them.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

One of our measures is how well Kaspon Techworks can comply with our specifications. Secondly, is their compliance with timelines. These factors depend on the initial brief, from a software architecture and user experience perspective. We had a very good lockdown of these elements before we started the development itself. From a compliance perspective, we only encountered minor bugs, which is part of the territory.

Kaspon Techworks has had 90–95% compliance to our original specifications and timelines. In terms of dedication and effort though, their compliance is 100%.

For our PC client, platform transition is very important. Any time a new product comes in, it has to go into various markets and retail shelves. This was a big limitation for them, but they now have a dashboard on which they can log in and find out at any point in time how many new and old PCs are being displayed in outlets, and they can choose the messages to be displayed on the units. They have a high level of planning capabilities, especially when it comes to transitioning to new products.

How did Kaspon Techworks perform from a project management standpoint?

In terms of project planning, their team has done a fairly good job of defining the user experience, software architecture, and timelines before we start development. Secondly, there has been constant interaction and project management through GitHub and JIRA. Kaspon Techworks is also good at performing code reviews, making sure that the output is optimized. There is a constant communication channel.

We had a recent question from the customer around the data consumption that occurs in a particular instance. Kaspon Techworks’ project manager sent a very detailed note to us, listing every point of data consumption, which we forwarded to the client.

What did you find most impressive about Kaspon Techworks?

We trust their basic capabilities to develop software, but more importantly, we trust the fact that Kaspon Techworks will walk the journey with us. This is very important for the kinds of projects we enter. Many times, we don’t actually know what our full scope will be from the start, so the partner needs to know that there will be problems along the way, and they need to be able to work them out. This is why we continue to work with Kaspon Techworks.

Are there any areas Kaspon Techworks could improve?

They could improve on some Agile-oriented process capabilities and with committing to timelines fully. They should also develop some analytics dashboards and other similar technical tools.