Onabitz

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am a senior researcher at Agricultural Mechanization UNIT (UMA) at Politechnical University of Catalonia (UPC), a public institution dedicated to higher education and research, specializing in the fields of engineering, architecture, and science.

In the context of agricultural machinery, UMA carries out three types of activities: teaching, research, and technology transfer. We have a close relationship with the major companies of agricultural machinery sector, and we have arranged several contracts and collaboration agreements with the most important pesticide and sprayer companies. UMA is also involved in public projects to improve the plant product treatments in vineyards and fruit crops. This makes it possible to organize teaching activities in which students come into contact with the latest developments in the sector.

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

We wanted to develop and easy to use APP and WEB to determine the amount of pesticide to use according crop characteristics. We contact Onabitz to design the interface user and create the APP both for Android and IOS OS and a WEB application.

Our goals were:

1. to add value to the research carried out at university by put knowledge closer to the end-user
2. to implement an algorithm developed by our research group on a APP and WEB
3. to design an intuitive, simple and friendly user interface where farmers can easily move through

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

One of the co-founder of Onabitz was former student at UPC faculty of agronomy. While discussing about precision agriculture and provide services to end-users we discuss about the role of APPs and WEB services.

There were two basic factors why we decide to work with Onabitz:

• they were staring the Onabitz project, so as a University we decide to support this starting initiative by contracting their services
• the team was motivated and the first impression was very good.

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

The work flow of the project was:

• initial series of meeting iterating the idea that we had in mind and their proposals until we finally got a user interface designed.
• First version of the APP based in Android with the interface user.
• Iteration until final design. Deliverable: structure of the User Interface
• the first proposal of user interface, the motor that uses the algorithms was mounted.
• Validation of the calculations by UPC team based on Android OS Deliverable: all functionalities foreseen are working
• Creation of the images that are inserted at the APP and WEB
• Creation of all texts that accompany the APP and WEB
• Iteration of the APP with definitive texts and images
• Translation to other languages of the texts
• Validation of format and calculations
• Deliverable: APP for Android and IOS ready to use Once APP version was ended (or under last review) they started to develop the WEB.
• Deliverable: user interface design
• Verification of the functionalities of WEB page
• Deliverable: final version

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

From UPC team, mainly there were two persons involved: the director of the research group and a senior researcher. From Onabitz, there was one single contact person, that was the Co-founder.

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

Since the APP (Android and IOS) was published we observed downloads from all the world, allowing the disseminate our research. The APP received a local prize on agronomic extension. All comments from the users are related to the friendly aspect of the product.

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

The communication with Onabitz was fluent using email, phone call and WhatsApp as a main channels of communication.

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

The honesty of the workers, the response speed when contacting them, the capacity of organization and reach deadlines.

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

From my experience, the work very professional.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I'm the CMO of ForoCoches, the largest Spanish car forum worldwide with approximately 9-10 million users. Our community was originally focused on cars and motorbikes, but now users are talking about everything from sports to society to personal problems.

What challenge were you trying to address with Onabitz?

Our platform had the original UI/UX from 2003 and needed an upgrade. We'd been with the same web designer for 19 years, and their design was getting stale and wasn't mobile-friendly. My firm wanted to create a new design that considered our users' needs and problems.

What was the scope of their involvement?

After completing user research, Onabitz helped us redesign our website. They presented us with several points that were not working well for our users and then developed a new design and UX. Once the frontend development was complete, Onabitz worked on the site's backend.

Our original platform was on Bulletin, and we didn't want to move because we'd done a lot of development work on that platform. So, Onabitz's design and development was customized work with the Bulletin platform. The Onabitz team adapted the design to be compatible with the platform and worked within the platform's development limits. 

What is the team composition?

We worked with two programmers, the CTO, and a UX designer from Onabitz. 

How did you come to work with Onabitz?

After several interviews with UX designers and back- and frontend developers, we realized we needed a full-service development company to ensure everyone was on the same page. In the end, we chose Onabitz from the three agencies we interviewed because they were talented, had a lot of programming knowledge, and had a cool portfolio. They'd also gotten good recommendations from startups and friends from Barcelona who have worked with Onabitz before. 

How much have you invested with them?

We invested over €35,000 (approximately $40,000 USD) with Onabitz and plan to spend another €20,000 (approximately $23,000 USD) with them in 2022. 

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in December 2020, and our engagement is ongoing. 

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

The new website launched in December 2021, two months ahead of our planned February 2022 launch. We run user surveys on the website every month to collect feedback. In November 2021, users gave us a 3.3 out of 5 stars rating for usability and experience. Last week, with the new design, we got 4.3 stars. Additionally, the time spent on the site on mobile devices has increased from 7.2 minutes to 8.1. Anecdotally, users tell us the new designs are better and the interface is more usable. Onabitz is a part of our business family now and we're going to keep working with them.

How did Onabitz perform from a project management standpoint?

Onabitz delivered the project very early, which was terrific because usually our projects get delayed. Their team solved problems quickly and was very eager to work on the project, which made us happy. We trade morning and afternoon emails daily and have weekly calls; we also utilize Google Meet. We use ClickUp to send Onabitz user feedback. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

Onabitz has shown us that they care as much about our products as we do. They work more hours than contracted to ensure everything is launched correctly and are always available. The Onabitz team is young, ambitious, and eager to know our industry.  

Are there any areas they could improve?

Onabitz needs to bring on more talent quicker. We're planning to give them website maintenance work, but they have a lot of hiring to do before we can give them that work. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Future customers need to be completely sincere in their limitations and company goals. Being patient is essential as Onabitz works to understand the customer's goals, tools, codes, and development history. We couldn't expect them to know everything about our 19-year old backend system and spent two weeks explaining it to them. Even then, they ended up finding a lot of issues with the codes, but we were patient. Customers can't rush the development process with Onabitz. 

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the CEO and the entrepreneur who brings the ideas and creativity of the business.

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

Initially I contacted them to develop a backend and fix a problem with the configuration of some drivers reading data from some sensors. We later worked on the development of the frontend and the design and configuration of the network.

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

Through an internet search I contacted one of the members of the Onabitz team and hired him to solve a very specific problem that I could not solve. I liked the way it worked and the solution to the problem, so I continued with them.

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

The project has two parts: one that monitors a series of sensors of the ship and another of records, both navigation and preventive and corrective maintenance. The first part uses open source systems to integrate different technologies and communication and data presentation. Specifically, node-red, eclipse-mosquitto, graphene. The part of the navigation, documentation and maintenance log is a front end developed in Angular that attacks a MySQL database via a backend in PHP.

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

I have interacted with one of them who, apart from being a developer, is also a partner in the company, and I know that at least two other people have been working on this project.

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

The results have been as expected and deliveries have been achieved on time.

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

Internally it is not known how they managed the project, but the results have been adequate.

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

Efficiency and versatility, in the sense that they can solve any IT problem for you.

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

I think they sometimes have more work to do than they can take on and that runs the risk of not being able to make commitments at some point.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the treasurer of the Association for non-regulated training in Catalonia

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

Onabitz was contacted to develop an ecosystem of mobile applications to digitalize the sector; an application for communication between training centers and the offer of different types of courses, an application for citizens that allows them to find among all the training offer, register and manage the certificates obtained and an application for teachers.

How did you select Onabitz and what were the deciding factors?

We chose Onabitz because they collaborated with another development company, after confronting several proposals. We found it to be a young and motivated team with enough experience to be able to tackle our project.

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

We have meetings every two weeks and we are making deliveries of the project that covers multiple aspects; backoffice, App for schools, App and web portal for students and App for teachers. The web portals are developed based on Wordpress and Java and the development of applications for iOS in Kotlin & Swift and for Android in Kotlin.

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

Our main contact is the project manager of Onabitz team, which is also made up of several developers and graphic designers.

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

We did not have applications for communication between centers and to offer their training to citizens and in each delivery we are increasing the functionalities of the applications that are in constant development.

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

We meet in person or in virtual format every week or fifteen days at most. We do the follow-up through production orders that are managed in excel 365.

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

I am impressed by their humane treatment and professionalism.

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

It would be better if they had more time or method to be able to analyze all possible bugs, since it would minimize the number of them before each publication of the new versions of the Apps.