Rikkeisoft

Please describe your company and your position there.

Our company provides customers with total solution service via cloud service/system for Web business use that has such features as planning, designing, development, introduction, maintenance and user support.

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

Shortage of workers, Cutting development costs

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

At an exhibition, where the company introduced themselves.

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

Our company requested that Rikkeisoft implement a system based on the basic design we created.

They understood the specified requirements, completed the detailed design, implementation in Java/JavaScript, unit, and combined tests.

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

On-site: None

Off-site: 

A large team of 40 members was organized at the start of the project. After that, 20 members (including 1 Project manager, 1 Bridge SE, 12 system engineers, 5 QA engineers and 1 Communicator) worked from the maintenance phase.

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

The product has already been released to the market, and it gives our customers a very positive impression.

It would have been difficult to complete this project without them.

We are really satisfied with their cooperation.

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

Despite the large-scale of the project with many team members over a long period, Rikkeisoft members worked on resolving issues diligently and completed the system release on time.

Although we put a lot of pressure on them at the beginning due to the large-scale and high-risk of the project, they provided great productivity and deliverables that met with our expectations.

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

They are highly skilled and can solve issues such as bug fixes or improvement of product performance.

They are not only good at creating things according to exact specifications, but also are reliable in research and investigation. Their deliverables made us greatly satisfied.

Furthermore, the project manager and the bridge SE are very good at Japanese. There are times that they do not understand what we told them very well, yet we mostly do not have a problem in communication. Being able to communicate with a project manager in Japanese directly is one of their strengths.

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

Rikkeisoft still needs final source code review and quality verification from us. We hope that they will be able to find and remove any mistakes through a thorough review so that we can completely entrust them with implementation or testing.

Rikkeisoft made a challenging project a great success with their cooperation.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

Express Design is a startup founded in 2017 in Vietnam, working in Design, Digital marketing and Communications. We offer graphic design, digital marketing, advertising, PR and communication services.

We position ourselves as a tech start-up which relies on online systems to improve customer experience and optimize the performance of our operation team thus giving us the best foundation to scale up.

During the early stage, we decided to invest heavily in technology, especially in the development of online software systems, such as online booking, CRM, digital assets management, delivery management and project management.

I am the co-founder and CTO of the company, who is in charge of making decisions and directions related to technology of the company. 

What challenge were you trying to address with the vendor?

There have been quite a few software solutions in the market to solve some of our requirements. However, they are not quite well integrated with each other and do not fully match with our processes and operations.

More importantly, they come with very little capability of customization and modification.

Positioning ourselves as a tech startup and using IT softwares in daily operation as our core values, we are aware of the importance of having our own customized solutions.

That is the reason we decided to look for software development vendors to build solutions for us. After a few meetings and discussions, we decided to go with Rikkeisoft for their great experience in the field and competitive price.

What was the scope of their involvement? 

Rikkeisoft’s scope of work involved a full cycle software development, from business analysis and consulting, solution design and implementation to release and maintenance services. 

Their business analysts and IT consultants worked closely with our COO to digitize our business processes and workflows. The development was done in an agile approach, where the Rikkeisoft team and our operation team kept implementing modules and features and released them every 2 week.

The deliverables after 3 months included an ecommerce website for online booking, an internal system for assets management, task tracking and project management and a delivery management to manage our deliverables and facilitate communication with our customers.

What is the team composition? 

The team consisted of our COO as the product owner, our operation team as stakeholders, and a team from Rikkeisoft consisting of an IT consultant, a business analyst, a project manager, a UI/UX designer, developers and testers. The size of the team was 12 people.

How did you come to work with the vendor?

We approached several vendors in the industry and found Rikkeisoft the most appropriate candidate for their strong experience with Business Process Management systems. Their consultants and sales team were quite persuasive and aggressive with the opportunity and we sealed the deal after 2 weeks with 4-5 meetings and discussions.

How much have you invested with them?

The investment was 30,000 USD in total, in the form of a project based contract, which Rikkeisoft delivered the softwares as agreed.

What is the status of this engagement?

The contract was completed

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

The online booking ecommerce website can be found at our homepage (expressdesign.vn). This is a website where our customers can place work orders and brief completely online.

Customers can also view the design on the website, provide feedback on the design and communicate with our account managers online. This allows us to keep a minimal team of account managers with the size 70-80% fewer than a traditional digital marketing agency.

How did the vendor perform from a project management standpoint?

The project management was performed quite well. Because the project was running in Agile, the objectives of each sprint must be closely aligned with our operation setup.

During the development, there were 2-3 sprints we were late for delivery due to the changing scopes but in the end the project was delivered on time and within our budget.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Rikkeisoft was one the very few software development companies having the capability to provide consulting services in Vietnam. Being a startup company with limited human resources, we did not have time and effort to write up a clear requirement for software development.

Rikkeisoft team provided a dedicated team working closely with our operation team to write user stories and documentation for us. Their consulting was very much appreciated because it helped us save costs by using as much open source software as possible and integrating them together.

Are there any areas they could improve?

The price was relatively high in Vietnam. But we were offered a good discount that we found it reasonable to proceed.