Moreland Connect

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I'm the founder of CrewTrak, a platform with a mobile app and website that caters to railroads, airlines, shipping, and the oil and gas industries to streamline how their crews are moved from point A to point B. We're also getting into non-medical transportation to help move folks with developmental disabilities. 

What challenge were you trying to address with Moreland Connect?

I wanted to address the functionality of our app and website. Although I had already had it built, it wasn't working as intended, and I needed somebody who understood what I needed and could develop it in the best way possible. I also needed a partner that would consider cost. 

What was the scope of their involvement?

Moreland Connect is building our app and website. They've revamped the geofencing and geolocation and streamlined how it worked and looked. The team has also added mapping features, vehicle geofencing, and vehicle scheduling. 

What is the team composition?

I've worked with five people from Moreland Connect, including the owners, developers, and project managers. 

How did you come to work with Moreland Connect?

The company that initially built my app referred me to them. I met with three developers and chose Moreland Connect because of their office atmosphere and previous work — I felt at home with them.

How much have you invested with them?

We've spent $50,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together around November 2021, and the engagement is ongoing.

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

We're a startup still trying to get the company up and running, so we don't have any metrics. However, I know how I want the platform to work. What Moreland Connect has built is exactly what I had envisioned when I first started and has even gone beyond that. The team has made the platform look better; it has great flow, and the functionality is simple and easy to use. Moreover, they've made the app clean and sharp-looking. That will help us with future clients because it looks like a grade-A mobile app and website. 

How did Moreland Connect perform from a project management standpoint?

We have biweekly sprint meetings. I have complete access to all the build information to see what's already been completed, so their transparency is fantastic. With this setup, I can follow along with the project even when we aren't meeting and see the progress they're making every day. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

Moreland Connect's customer service is outstanding, and we have a comfort level with them where we feel like we know them. The team is very personable; we feel like we're talking to friends. 

This project means a lot to me and represents a huge risk; Moreland Connect understands that. They care about what I'm doing and want it to be the best. This makes me want to stay with them and have them build all future versions of the platform.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, everything has been fantastic. 

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We’re a digital healthcare company that provides clinicians with an early alerting and clinical-decision support platform for labor and delivery units.

What challenge were you trying to address with Moreland Connect?

Moreland Connect has been our software development partner from the very beginning. Initially, the idea for our product came from the clinicians working in our hospital’s obstetric quality and patient safety unit. They wanted to create a software piece that could improve the way they took care of patients, and they needed a development partner.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Moreland Connect has been responsible for designing and developing the software solution that our clinicians had designed on paper. Their involvement has focused on taking our clinicians’ vision, using the hospital data feeds needed to power the solution, and designing the UI they requested.

What is the team composition?

We’ve worked with various people from Moreland Connect at a variety of levels, but Jeff (CEO) has always supervised the project. Additionally, Justin (Senior Consultant) has acted as the lead solution architect for the past several years, and he has brought several other engineers into the project as needed.

How did you come to work with Moreland Connect?

We’ve been engaged with Moreland Connect even before our company existed. Our company was originally a spin-off of a hospital system. When the clinicians had the idea for this software, they applied for a grant and received it. As part of the grant-awarding process, Moreland Connect was assigned as the software development company that would prototype the solution, so we don’t know exactly how they were selected.

Once we launched the prototype and established ourselves as a separate company, we continued working with Moreland Connect because they had been a great partner.

How much have you invested with them?

Our investment has been hundreds of thousands of dollars.

What is the status of this engagement?

Moreland Connect has been working on developing our software since 2016, and our engagement is ongoing after all these years.

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

The first important milestone that we achieved with Moreland Connect’s help was getting our software approved as an application by the Epic App Orchard, the US's market-leading electronic health record company. Moreland Connect shepherded us through the process of getting the software approved, which means that any hospital in the country that uses Epic can now download and utilize our software. Basically, Moreland Connect took a solution running in a single hospital environment and architected it so that it was scalable and effectively utilized by any hospital in the country.

How did Moreland Connect perform from a project management standpoint?

Moreland Connect performs very well. We always set mutually-agreed deadlines, and they’re always clear about what they will deliver and when.

Software development projects, particularly for the healthcare industry, are a moving target. They require different things, and they constantly need changes. Still, Moreland Connect has been very clear about what they can do, and they let us know the order of priorities to achieve those goals.

I know that they use Jira on their end to manage the project, but they’ve also been very adaptive to use whichever project management tool works best for our customers. For example, they’ve used Google Sheets and Smartsheet documents when required.

We typically communicate with them via email, and we have check-in calls at least every week. Although most calls are between Moreland Connect and us, we also bring some of our hospital clients into those calls.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Moreland Connect is a very diverse company, and there’s very little they can’t do from a software development perspective. Additionally, they focus on very agile and rapid-cycle design and development processes. Thanks to their agility and quick adaptability to our ever-shifting needs, they’re not afraid to tackle a new challenge or do something new.

Furthermore, Moreland Connect is an incredibly friendly and approachable group. They’re committed to delivering high-quality products, as well as to ensuring client satisfaction.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, our experience has been very positive.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

If you make it clear to Moreland Connect what your needs are and when you need those needs to be fulfilled, they can and will deliver.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CIO of a billion-dollar-in-revenue, publicly-traded company providing outsourced healthcare services.

What challenge were you trying to address with Moreland Connect?

Moreland Connect supports us with web application development projects and more.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We’ve worked with Moreland Connect across several different projects, mostly focused on web app development, but we’ve also worked on other projects related to infrastructure hosting. We usually provide them with a general overview of each project, although the requirements can come in different formats. Sometimes, we provide them with a bulleted list of  requirements, but other times, we meet informally, discuss our ideas, and they drive it from there. Every project is Azure-hosted, and we mainly use the .NET framework.

What is the team composition?

The team from Moreland Connect varies in size from project to project, and we usually don’t know how many people are working in the background. However, we always interact with at least two people from their team at any given point in time.

Once we get into a project, our main point of contact is Justin (Senior Consultant), who acts as the project manager and software architect. Additionally, we’ve worked with John (CTO) and Jeff (CEO).

How did you come to work with Moreland Connect?

I joined my current role in October 2019, and Moreland Connect was already working for us. I believe that we were initially introduced to them through another partner when we were working on a corporate rebranding project that required some development work. This partner outsourced the development work to Moreland Connect, and we continued going directly with them the next time we needed additional development services.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent around $500,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

Moreland Connect started working with my company around January 2018. Although we don’t have an active project at the moment, our relationship is ongoing.

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

Moreland Connect’s involvement allows us to be more agile. Whenever we get a new project request, we can outsource it to them because they’re always available. Although I don’t have any hard metrics on the success of their work, our projects continuously come on target.

How did Moreland Connect perform from a project management standpoint?

Moreland Connect does a great job at project management, and they’ve always met our expectations around budget and timing. We have weekly status meetings and get weekly status reports. However, they’re very flexible and responsive to the project needs, and if weekly meetings aren't enough by the end of a project, they can adjust to more frequent meetings.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Although they’re an outsourced company, Moreland Connect feels like an extension of our team.

Are there any areas they could improve?

It would be a great improvement for Moreland Connect if they had a more formal approach to their infrastructure management services. They’ve developed an application for us, and they’re currently hosting it, but we don’t have a formal hosting agreement in place. However, we’re working on that.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Go into the project with a partnership mentality. Moreland Connect wants to be your partner, and they need your feedback and answers throughout the project in order to have a more successful outcome. Thus, it is best to have a person from your team capable of making decisions involved in the project.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CEO of AIR Training Solutions, an online provider of professional development. We service educators, both K–12 teachers and childcare providers, to train them on how to service the children better.

What challenge were you trying to address with Moreland Connect?

We needed a new website with custom-developed solutions necessary to meet our strict clientele requirements.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Moreland Connect has helped us with web development projects for many years, the most important of them being developing our company’s site from scratch. They’ve also built various custom systems and integrated them into our site.

Before engaging with Moreland Connect for this project, we were using a WordPress website, and the shopping cart feature was not meeting our needs. Thus, they helped us build a Google Site, which allowed us to customize our shopping cart options for our customers. Although they’ve built our site completely from scratch, they initially used our former site to have some guidance on what we were doing before.

Moreland Connect has also helped us build our site’s pages in a way they called Google Simplified. This page style allows customers to easily follow each step of the process.

The project has also required design and a lot of custom development work in other areas. For example, we allowed administrators to bulk-purchase services for their staff members, but they needed to be able to see their staff members on the platform and purchase multiple courses for each one of them. Thus, developing features to meet those needs was very important as well.

Currently, Moreland Connect hosts our site, and they help us fix any issues when needed.

What is the team composition?

We’ve worked with four people from Moreland Connect. We were mostly in contact with the project manager and a developer during the development phase, but we’ve also talked with Jeff (CEO), who has been very involved in the project.

How did you come to work with Moreland Connect?

A marketer I knew also knew Moreland Connect, and this person referred me to them. At the same time, Moreland Connect was building a website for my father, who also recommended them. We worked together on a different project back then, in 2017, and we have kept working with them since.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent over $250,000 on our different projects.

What is the status of this engagement?

Although we’ve been working with Moreland Connect since 2017, we started working on this specific project in October 2020. It took them about 10 months to complete the site, but our engagement continued, and it is still ongoing.

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

Moreland Connect has done such an amazing job developing the custom features that some of the states that we service have tried to copy our platform and haven’t been able to do so. The Google Simplified pages allow us to improve our customer service by ensuring that the process for our clients is very easy to follow and thus, reducing our customer service calls.

In addition to the great features, Moreland Connect has made the right API integrations and condensed our site’s data in such a good way that it works way better than before and is much faster.

As opposed to other industries, we got busier with the pandemic because the requirements for education were still in place, but the only way to get those services was online. It was very challenging for us to improve our systems while keeping the platform up and running.

Despite the pandemic, I had 11% growth when we deployed the new website. Now, I’m seeing between 24%–35% growth in any given month. This is a great result because not many companies can say that they’ve seen double-digit growth over the last two and a half years, especially due to the challenges of the pandemic.

How did Moreland Connect perform from a project management standpoint?

Moreland Connect has been very good at projecting what the job will cost, and the only times we’ve exceeded those projections have been when we’ve asked for extras. Regarding time management, we’ve stayed on time on almost every task. Although there have been things we haven’t been able to control, they’ve always tried to keep everything on track.

More importantly than staying on track, Moreland Connect has been great at communicating with us when unforeseeable things happen and having a plan to get through them, which we appreciate very much. We communicate via email, which helps us keep on track. Additionally, we have Zoom meetings to share screens and look at things together.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Moreland Connect has a great ability to keep the communication lines open with their clients.

Are there any areas they could improve?

As awesome as their communication is, Moreland Connect has room for improvement in being more communicative. I appreciate their feedback a lot, and it would be great if they continued to provide me with that feedback.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Structure your project’s scope out and define who’s responsible for what. If you also ad timelines and deliverables to that scope, you’re going to have a great relationship with Moreland Connect because you’ll manage expectations.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the VP of business development for JMI Reports, an insurance services organization. We service the property and casualty underwriting divisions of carriers, and we provide inspection services and risk assessments for property underwriting.

What challenge were you trying to address with Moreland Connect?

For 15 years, we had developed another proprietary software platform with another vendor, on which we operated our business. When we started developing the platform, we were a much smaller company than we had grown to be. The software did help us grow, but we found ourselves over a barrel with the fact that we didn't own the code and that the previous provider had control over all the infrastructure. 

We had made the decision to hire another company to help us build a new custom software given the changes in the property-casualty insurance industry.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Moreland Connect developed a custom software for us. Prior to this new software, our contractor field inspectors would go out with digital cameras, take photos, do measurements, capture notes, and then come back to their computers, upload the photos and labels, and fill out our online forms. They would then submit all the data to a quality assurance review process so they could finalize the reports for the valuation.

One of the biggest changes that we implemented to the software was a feature that allowed our field inspectors to go out to the properties with their tablets or smartphones and complete everything they needed to do right then and there, making the entire process much more efficient.

Aside from that, Moreland Connect provides IT infrastructure support, which involves redundancy back-ups and AWS support. They also provide Cloud support remotely.

What is the team composition?

We work with Jeff (Co-Founder & Managing Partner), John (Co-Founder & Managing Partner), and Steve (Senior Manager), the integration specialist. We also work with 4-5 other people from Moreland Connect.

How did you come to work with Moreland Connect?

I was introduced to Moreland through another contact. We had a couple of initial discussions wherein we went over our entire business and our circumstances with our previous software vendor. Immediately, I was impressed with how quickly they grasped what we did as a business and what the technology needs were.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent somewhere between $2-$3 million so far.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in August 2017, and the engagement is ongoing.

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

We had to rush into going live on this software before it was truly ready. That was because of some circumstances with our prior vendor and our contract running out with them. The other challenge was that a new owner acquired us in 2019, and they decided not to continue to develop the software. They wanted to transition to their software platform, which is based on Salesforce.

Once we got the business back this past June, we were able to get back to work to finish what we started. We've hit a stride in the last 6-8 months after we extricated ourselves from the Salesforce platform and implemented more and new functionality and customization to this software. 

The differential that the software has made just in the last 6-8 months has been huge in terms of the functionality, efficiencies for the field, shortcuts, our QA process, and how we go in and review cases. We still have a lot of work to do on the client end in terms of the analytics and the data reporting that we can offer them, but our relationship with Moreland Connect has been a complete 180 degrees compared with the previous vendor.

How did Moreland Connect perform from a project management standpoint?

Moreland Connect has performed really well in terms of project management. We have a meeting twice a week, and we communicate daily through meetings or through email.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I’m most impressed with Moreland Connect’s knowledge, creativity, and the speed at which they deliver their work. I really appreciate their creativity and really their intelligence when it comes to understanding the concepts of what we wanted to do.

They’ve come up with some really incredible solutions, most of which we hadn't even thought of, that turned out to be substantial in terms of our workflows and efficiencies within the software itself.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Make sure to discuss what you want to achieve and what your expectations are before you begin the project.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the VP of sales for Whirley-DrinkWorks!.

What challenge were you trying to address with Moreland Connect?

We were trying to move to a new ERP solution.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We initially used Moreland Connect as an expert in the field. They came in and evaluated our different departments and needs. They held workshops, entered meetings, and helped define a core team to select the ERP software. As part of the ERP onboarding, they developed a custom configurator to help us use our different platforms.

We spent 3–4 months defining our needs and structure, choosing potential ERP platforms. It took us about a year to develop it and get it off the ground. Then, we worked with them to develop the custom configurator.

What is the team composition?

We’ve worked with three people. In the beginning, the CEO and CIO helped us pick out and define our needs for the new ERP platform. On the development side, we’ve worked with two people and a senior managing director on the development side. Underneath him, 3–4 team members help with the code. If we have any questions or concerns, we can reach out to their senior leadership.

How did you come to work with Moreland Connect?

We found them three years ago through a referral. We had some contacts that worked in larger consulting development firms.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve probably spent $200,000–300,000. Their consulting fees are around $100,000 over two years, and the actual software is about $150,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We began working together in June 2018 and went live in March 2020. Although we don’t have any project currently going on, we still bill them 30–40 hours per year for maintenance services on our configurator and communicate once or twice per quarter. I don’t think our relationship with them will end.

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

We hit the goal dates during development, so it was great that Moreland Connect delivered on time. Actually, they did it faster than what we’d scheduled. Some issues and system concerns came up, but they pulled it off in the end. If they had to work some weekends or nights, they did it.

How did Moreland Connect perform from a project management standpoint?

They used Trello to manage the project. We did conference calls when we started. It was pre-COVID, so they worked on-site almost every week.

Now, we communicate primarily through Zoom or Microsoft Teams.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They always find a way to make it happen. Also, it’s great the company is small enough to have their chief officers involved in the project.

Moreover, they were good at teaching and coaching. A large company might not need it because they’re more structured and used to the software development process, but Moreland Connect recognized our gaps and coached us. They brought in tools to teach us to improve and get through the selection process instead of forcing one solution down our throats. In summary, they taught us how to look at things.

Also, the team was willing to be on-site and work the hours they needed to work. Other people leave if they’re only getting paid from 7:00 a.m.–3:00 p.m., but Moreland Connect is willing to stay until the work is done.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I can’t think of anything significant. Maybe they could’ve gotten more of the team involved when we worked on the configurator. Their executive team was here, but they wanted to keep their working team back at the office. Having more team members may have saved us a few weeks.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Listen to them. Some companies may come in and feel they know everything, but if you’re open to their processes, they can find a solution and lead you across the finish line.