Quantanite

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

My company provides the world’s most advanced receipt scanning software. We power applications with tens of millions of users and scan in excess of 1 billion receipts per year. Our software extracts every possible detail from consumer purchase receipts across the entire retail industry, and our robust catalog system helps make sense of the data collected.

Companies in industries ranging from Finance to Market Research to Loyalty to Shopper Marketing use our software to analyze SKU-level purchase data at scale. Our real-time receipt scanning software is based on the latest research in machine learning. It runs locally and on-device, which allows companies to scale infinitely at low cost.

Our team continues to find new ways to design state-of-the-art neural networks and optimize our own proprietary OCR for receipt specific use cases across the globe. I work on the BlinkReceipt product in coordination with a team of engineers.

Our data extraction portfolio currently includes physical receipts, digital receipts, product intelligence, catalog, and duplicate detection/fraud. Within each system we work to enhance the product and continuously run regressions so we can measure the product against ground truth data. Our goal is to constantly be improving the product for our customers.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Quantanite?

We hired Quantanite for human receipt transcription. The purpose of this project was to improve our ground truth and thus our product. Quantanite has done a fabulous job thus far with minimal guidance and management from my company.

SOLUTION

How did you select Quantanite?

Quantanite was referred to our team in New York City via our colleagues in our Zagreb, Croatia office. We spoke with several vendors, but were impressed with Quantanite's technical capabilities and intimate understanding of transcription, annotation, and general machine learning.

Describe the project in detail and what their cost structure looked like.

Quantanite specifically is transcribing receipts to establish ground truth relative to what we are returning. We currently have a team of 10 full time employees in their Dhaka, Bangladesh office. These receipts are in english. Quantanite is transcribing SKU level data as well as time, date, merchant, etc. They bill us on a fixed monthly $ amount per full time employee (FTE).

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

How would you describe/assess the quality of their work?

The quality of Quantanite's work is high. They consistently met or exceeded our expectations. Their ability to keep our information secure was never an issue. They work quickly and with efficiency.

What impressed you about their services?

Quantanite is good at completing repetitive technical tasks at scale. They have proven their capabilities to us.

Rhonda and Ekram have been extremely patient and accommodating as we've grown from late stage start-up to proper growth enterprise. Arman and Maesha have been very thoughtful on the workflow side. In the past, we have kept everything internal.

Are there any areas for improvement?

Quantanite has done everything we've asked of them. We were in touch with their management frequently. We look forward to dedicating more resources to the relationship to extract further value from their Dhaka team's hard work.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Our company is an online marketplace for temproary staffing and I am cofounder and COO.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Quantanite?

We hired Quantanite to assist our financial and operations department with a lot of these matters, which ranged from basic accounting to data entry.

What were your goals for this project?

Have the analysts at Quantanite absorb our inefficiencies in a costly manner as much as possible.

SOLUTION

How did you select Quantanite?

They reached out to us and talked us through their solution. It seemed like the right approach for us and after trialing one of their analysts we were sold and now have now had at least 1 analyst from Quantanite at all times since 2017. We currently have 2.

Describe the project in detail.

In a start up there are numerous processes you have to gets to grips with and end up doing a lot of unscalable things to scale.

What was the team composition?

It has varied over time, but currently two analysts and one project manager.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We have kept the analysts for 4 years.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

It was very effective. Their analysts are like an extension of our full-time team.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Large number of strong candidates, who are very committed to any task put in front of them.

Are there any areas for improvement?

None I can think of.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the SVP of Business Development for a US based Online Ordering company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Quantanite?

Quantanite was contracted to fill our need for additional menu programmers and support staff.

What were your goals for this project?

Our goals were to offer near 24 hour services to our clients.

SOLUTION

How did you select Quantanite?

Our CEO researched support service providers and after reviewing several results decided Quantanite was the best fit for our company.

Describe the project in detail.

We have two ongoing projects with Quantanite. The first is in our Menu development division. We have 3 Quantanite representatives programming food menus for online order. In the second project we have 3 Quantanite support representatives assisting our support department after hours and now during open hours.

What was the team composition?

We have two teams that consist of 1-2 managers along with 2-4 support or menu programmers.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Quantanite continues to grow and develop with our company. We have added additional support and menu staff.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

It would be hard to pinpoint where our team ends and theirs begins. We work as if we are one team. All of the Quantanite employees have been very easy to work with and easily trained on our systems.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Quantanite has been very flexible and accommodating. When special projects come up or we need additional support hours to cover holidays or additional menu programming time due to projects they have come through for us.

Are there any areas for improvement?

Yet to be seen.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I work specifically for SkipTheDishes, and we're a part of the Just Eat - Takeaway family, a food delivery business. We're the third-largest food delivery provider globally. Our goal is to ensure that people have the best choice of any type of food item that gets delivered to them. 

I'm the director of restaurant success for Western Canada. My teams are responsible for the direct relationship and account management of our restaurant partners. I also have the menu content team, and they're responsible for programming all of the menus that show up on the network. 

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Quantanite?

We’re trying to ensure that we provide the best service level to our restaurant partners and that we're able to update their menus in a prompt fashion. We're really challenged with the number of requests that we receive regularly, so we work with Quantanite to help us to achieve our service levels. 

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Quantanite works with the menu content team to help us achieve our service levels around programing the menu content. Their job includes programming new menus, any type of specials our partners would like to see, seasonal changes, and changes that have come about due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We don’t need them to do any research; we just need them to do programming. 

They also support the upload of images so that all of the menus have images attached to them. They've also been trained to support account creation, where we create accounts for new restaurant partners that sign up with our service.

Quantanite supports what we call Change Active, where an active restaurant partner requests updates, whether it be price updates, additions, or combo updates on their menu.

The engagement includes training and ramp-up phases. The team has gone through initial training to get used to the actual way we program the menus within our system. Then, they’ve gone through another phase where we can leave them on their own once their quality has met a certain benchmark. 

Overall, they provide account creation, menu image uploads, Change Actives, and specific marketing and promotion. 

What is the team composition?

At one point, we had 85 people, and 50 of them were temporary. We started with 35 team members. Then, we ramped up and added an additional 50 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, we're back down to 35.

How did you come to work with Quantanite?

Our hiring manager at the time brought them to us, and the first reason we hired them was their price. 

The second reason was their level of experience. When I jumped on the phone with Quantanite, they already had the experience in supporting this type of work for other competitors across the industry. 

There was a level of familiarity, and completing the menus' programming component wasn’t new to them. That was a good thing for us. We didn’t have to teach them, and they already knew what they were doing from a menu perspective, so we hired them. 

Those were the top two factors of why we decided to go with them. 

How much have you invested with them?

We invested between $250,000–$300,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them in February 2020, and the engagement is ongoing. We were supposed to ramp down and finish our working relationship in December 2020.

However, I've extended them out to January 2021 based on what I'm forecasting from a business perspective and our need to maintain our service level. 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Right now, Quantanite is exceeding our productivity expectations. I get reports in terms of our anticipated outputs from them, such as the number of minutes they expect to take to complete a number of tasks, and the number of tasks they actually complete.

Consistently, they've been over 100%, and they’re completing their work faster than I expect them to. 

How did Quantanite perform from a project management standpoint?

Their project management has been great. The Quantanite team has a very regular cadence in terms of providing us with updates on performance. Their members have at least a weekly call with their team leads. 

They’ve also been very communicative and collaborative. We used Google Hangout for video conference calls. Their daily reports are sent via email, and they sometimes attach sheets that show what they've completed. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

They’ve done a good job of managing our relationship and having regular contact. Their account management has also been fantastic. Mike (VP & Head of Client Solutions) has been a pleasure to work with.

He's been very eager to maintain the business relationship and be very forthcoming about what they can do to continue the relationship with our organization. 

The only reason we're moving away from the relationship is we want to move all of our customer touchpoints in-house, and the menu is deemed to be one of those. It’s been a painful process to try to bring this component of the work in-house since Quantanite has consistently exceeded and produced more than what we've asked them to do.

Are there any areas they could improve?

We had some hiccups in the beginning, but Mike very quickly made it right. As they were going through the ramp-up phase, we had an instance where they weren’t meeting our expectations. Their outputs were well below what we expected. We jumped on a call and asked what was going on.

We worked through communication and expectations. At that point, they had some additional staff that they provided for free, so we could achieve what we needed from an output perspective. 

Now that we've gone through that process of understanding each other and working together in terms of developing a solid partnership, their outputs have been consistent, so we're happy with them. We didn't start at 100% right out of the gate, but they’ve continuously worked towards the deliverables.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

It's important to be clear on deliverables and expectations. Once those things are clear, then it's really easy to be on the same page. If you need to course-correct, then it's easy to go back to the expectations that have been laid out and that they’re not hitting. In my experience, they can make this right.