Sembit

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the COO of an outpatient mental health organization serving multiple states.

What challenge were you trying to address with Sembit?

We previously used another vendor, but they didn’t meet our expectations. They weren’t communicative and failed to meet our deadlines. We needed help updating and improving our website, and we also needed someone to build our iOS app. 

What was the scope of their involvement?

Sembit is revamping our website using Contentful. They are also building our iOS app from scratch, and we’re doing the project at 10–12 weeks increments. We’ve initially just needed an MVP, but we are so impressed with their work that we will have them build the entire app.

What is the team composition?

I’ve worked with four people, including Shaun (VP), a senior engineer, and some junior engineers.

How did you come to work with Sembit?

I reached out to my network and asked for referrals. A friend who knew Sembit’s work recommended them to me. I interviewed Sembit, and I was very impressed with their portfolio and their clear understanding of what we were looking for. 

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve invested about $200,000 so far, but we’ll probably spend a lot more this year. 

What is the status of this engagement?

We’ve been working together since August 2021, and our partnership is ongoing. 

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

Sembit has delivered on everything we’ve asked them. We’ve been impressed with their work, and customer feedback about the app has been good. 

How did Sembit perform from a project management standpoint?

Sembit’s project management is amazing. They’ve taken ownership of the engagement, and I don’t need to be involved. Their team provides me with updates on their progress during our weekly meetings. They also send a written update that shows where they are relative to our timeline and budget. 

Sembit has over-delivered on their promises at every step of the process. They’ve come in ahead of schedule and below budget, and they let us know if we are asking for too much. They are clear communicators, and it made a world of difference for our company. Outside of our meetings, I can call or email at any point, and Shaun usually answers me. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

After being burned badly by the previous vendor I’ve worked with, I can say Sembit is extremely knowledgeable in their field. It’s easy for them to pivot if we change our direction, and they’re very supportive of our mission and vision. They are thoughtful that what they’re building will support our company.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I can’t think of anything. I’m just impressed with Sembit, and working with them is like a breath of fresh air after my failed engagement with my previous vendor. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Ensure that you meet regularly and explain what your end goal is.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the marketing director of a multi-brand corporation. We’re based in Hawaii, and we have around 150 employees.

What challenge were you trying to address with Sembit?

We asked Sembit to build a tool to support our custom framing business.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Our partnership started with a discovery process, where we explained to them our objectives and what we wanted to achieve. We mentioned our preferred look and feel as well as the purpose of the custom tool they were going to build.

The team first built the home page and static content pages on BigCommerce. After that, they proceeded to build a custom configurator that could enable our customers to order frames, which they could pick up from our store.

What is the team composition?

We’re working with Shaun (VP) and one of the main developers.

How did you come to work with Sembit?

One of our employees who was involved in the project referred their team. She never worked with them personally, but she had a friend that highly recommended Sembit. After our initial meeting with the team, we felt pretty confident that they could deliver what we needed.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent $50,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our ongoing collaboration ran from July 2021.

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

We haven’t launched the custom tool yet because a lot of our materials are out of stock. Despite that, in terms of functionality and the testing that we’ve done, everything appears to be working properly, and we’re looking forward to launching our tool soon.

In the future, our measure of success would be seeing our customers successfully ordering their frames using our custom tool. On the backend, we’d like to see our teams fulfill those orders easily without a lot of headaches. Our goal is to have clear communication as far as what our customers want and offer them a user-friendly tool.

How did Sembit perform from a project management standpoint?

Considering the complexity of our tool,  Sembit has done a really good job of anticipating our needs. They’ve pretty much stuck to our budget and to our agreed timeframe.

In addition, they’ve clearly communicated any instances where they’re going to deviate from what we’ve initially discussed. We mainly keep in touch through email. Overall, their communication skills have been great throughout the process.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their ability to figure out and suggest resources or solutions that would meet our needs has been impressive. They’ve also been good at listening to what we want and getting a clear understanding of what we prefer. In addition, since they’re familiar with what we want, they’ve given as well thought out solutions.

Are there any areas they could improve?

We initially had a bit of misunderstanding as far as what the scope was, but it didn’t really inflict so much damage on the project. It just took us a while to fully communicate our needs and for them to fully understand them. Once we corrected that and everybody got on the same page, our process became seamless.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Sembit is highly-engaged so I wouldn’t be worried about trying to pull them into the discussion. I’d say the best thing that you could do is to come fully prepared with a clear plan of what you want to accomplish. The more information you could provide, the more seamless the process would be.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the founder of a SaaS company for commercial real estate owners.

What challenge were you trying to address with Sembit?

I worked in the commercial real estate industry for a number of years. I hired Sembit to build our web platform's MVP. I also engaged with them to help me launch it.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Our web platform primarily contains a suite of communication tools — integrating voice, text, and email which will be all looped through a QR code. Sembit has completed the wireframes of our product based on the initial brief we had with a previous firm.

They’re now doing a very light design approach, and they ensure that our web platform is mobile-optimized. Our priority right now is building out the functionalities we need and building traction with our end-users before polishing our product. They're currently doing bug fixes now.

What is the team composition?

We’re working with Sembit’s account manager and two tech people. For the tech roles, the first one handles the project’s overview. The second one is responsible for our programming needs and is also in charge of implementing bug fixes.

How did you come to work with Sembit?

I found Sembit on Clutch. What convinced us to work with them was their experience in implementing QR code integrations. In fact, they helped a Japanese firm to create dynamic QR codes.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent over $100,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in January 2021, and it’s ongoing.

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

For external results, we can’t share anything yet. However, Sembit has created the functionalities that we wanted. There are a couple of bugs here and there, but they quickly resolve them. On top of that, a couple of our colleagues have been very excited about our product. Overall, I’m very happy with what they’ve done.

How did Sembit perform from a project management standpoint?

We communicate with Sembit using Trello. They have great project management process, and they’ve been with us since the beginning. They’ve consistently worked hard, so we’ve got great rapport. In addition, they’re good at setting and meeting expectations. Overall, we love working with them.

What did you find most impressive about them?

We trust Sembit's guidance. They have a technical team that I can count on, and they suggest helpful solutions to improve the project we’re working on. It really feels like we've become partners. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

They should offer cheaper services.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Find out who your team is and get a sense of whether or not they’re going to stick with you.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the COO of a legal services firm.

What challenge were you trying to address with Sembit?

One of the things we do for our clients is that we gather feedback with their employees on leadership role changes or other things going on in the firm so that they can improve. We needed a platform that could gather that data for us in a user-friendly manner, as well as spit the information back out so we could generate feedback reports for our clients.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We had a discovery phase where we had several meetings with them so they could know exactly what we needed and what expertise we lacked so they could fulfill our needs. Then, they gave us wireframes based on these initial conversations. From there, it was easy to move forward. We launched the beta in March, and are continuing to develop it.

It’s an internal platform that’s secure so we can protect our clients’ data. I’m not tech-savvy to tell you what platforms they used, but it’s software they developed from scratch.

What is the team composition?

We started with two from Sembit, and they just brought on a third.

How did you come to work with Sembit?

We have a marketing person who knows about them through an online group. When I Googled them, I knew they were the right company.

How much have you invested with them?

We’re getting close to $50,000 on the first project, and are approaching $15,000 on another. I imagine we’ll invest more.

What is the status of this engagement?

We’ve been working together since October 2020 and plan on working with them well into the future.

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

It’s been excellent every step of the way. The initial conversations were excellent — we had an instant human connection. In addition to being professional, they also had a human touch that’s irreplicable. Their wireframes were outstanding— they were almost good enough to be live. They clearly took the time to understand us and our goals.

When we launched the product in beta, we received tons of feedback. It’s been incredibly positive, with our consultants praising how user-friendly it is, how much they’ve enjoyed using it, etc. We don’t have specific stats yet, but it’s been nothing but positive feedback.

How did Sembit perform from a project management standpoint?

They’re excellent. We have weekly calls, they provide weekly updates, and have a reporting system that keeps us up to date on budget and what they’ve completed

What did you find most impressive about them?

I knew they were interested in solving our problems from the get-go. They’re great listeners who want to solve your problems. They’re excellent, a fantastic value.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No. They keep stepping up, even as we throw curveballs at them.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Have a really clear directive heading into the project.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the co-founder and CEO of Grantstone Ventures, and PickleballRatings.com is our primary software product and service. We use the common Elo algorithm to process player ratings for tournaments and clubs in the fast growing sport of pickleball, which is the offspring of a passionate night spent between tennis, ping-pong, and badminton.

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

We built a custom piece of software to integrate three platforms, in which the platform (tournament software) that was the primary data source was a legacy piece of software. This was a daunting project, and when it was all complete and functioning, we sought bids for an independent valuation of the cost to replicate this effort.

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

Shaun and his team at Sembit blew away the competition -- it was clear right away that Sembit was willing to do the deep dive into our project and the code to really understand what was needed in this project and how we accomplished it.

The other agencies we looked at, frankly, wanted to tell us how great they were. Sembit instead asked a lot of probing questions and provided the kind of consultation that really made us comfortable in hiring them.

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

Here is what we shared with the agencies that we reached out to: Application will be a 3-party API integration between tournament software vendor, ratings processing vendor (self) and governing body of sport. Scripts will run each week to pull updated source data from governing body membership data and tournament results and player data.

Tournament match results can be exported per-tournament as HTML, but each match result shows player names (first/last) in the HTML output. Will need to dig into existing Perl web app code to change that output from first/last to instead output a player's unique record ID. Internally the existing software has a flat file database for tourney data, and a separate SQL database for player data.

Additionally, there is a large subset of match results where a player's unique record ID is not linked, this is because some tournaments' data get "imported" through an external-data-import process. Need to dig into existing Perl web app code to try to re-link these orphaned player records.

In addition to parsing match outcome data from the HTML data, also need to identify matches that end in forfeit or withdrawal so they can be not-included for ratings changes. Other tournament data such as tournament title, date of tournament, name of individual brackets/events needs to be parsed from the HTML data.

Tournament sanctioned-status needs to be retrieved from the flat-file database for purpose of weighting the Elo algorithm more heavily for sanctioned tournaments. This will be a new, separate Perl script in the existing Web app, it will expose a JSON dump of tournament IDs with the sanction field value.

Tournament results will need to be classified as Men's Doubles, Women's Doubles, Mixed Doubles, Men's Singles and Women's singles. Need to write an algorithm that looks at the title of each tournament event and parses it into one of these 5 classifications. A given player can have 1, 2 or 3 ratings: gender doubles, mixed doubles and singles.

Tournament results will need to be sorted by date so they can be processed for ratings in chronological order.

Tournament player data (as opposed to match results) can be exported as a JSON dump from the SQL database, the master player database contains normalized tournament entrant data, so there is only one player record for many tournaments.

The master player database contains many duplicate entries for players, some players have 2 or 3 accounts and other players have 6 or 8 accounts, need help identifying and reconciling player data problems so that ratings engine combines all match results together for a given player even if they have 2 or more player records.

To create the initial Elo "starting point" ratings for players, we want to write a program that looks at the first bracket they played in, up to 3 years ago. It would look at the other players in the bracket and average the other players' ratings to create a players new rating.

After establishing initial ratings for all players, we want to "re-balance" the distribution of player-ratings. We will provide percentages for the expected amount of 3.5, 4.0, 5.0+ etc players, we are looking for a custom program that will allow us to move players up and down at the outset, to create the correct numbers of players at different rating levels.

After the ratings system is launched, when new players play in a tournament, they will get a new rating based on the average of the ratings of other players in their bracket. When tournaments are processed each week for the purpose of ratings-changes, will need to expose an API where weekly updated ratings can be downloaded in two formats.

One format will associate governing body member ID (is available in the master player database) with the player ratings (up to 3 ratings per player). This format will be used to update the governing body player database.

The other format will associate the player unique ID with his updated ratings for the purpose of updating the ratings as they appear in the tournament player master database. This output will have to accomodate any players who have multiple/merged player accounts. Need to create a web app for displaying each week's ratings processing per-player.

This web app will have 5 reports for each week's ratings, one for each of the 5 classes of ratings.

The report will list all of the players and ratings in a searchable/sortable list, clicking on an individual player will show the details of all of that players match results going back 3 years, including the rating-change for all four players in each match and will include a visual graph showing the players rating history over time.

This web app will need to have user-authentication so only administrators can view the ratings. When tournaments are processed for ratings changes, need to check the sanction field for sanctioned status and "weight" the Elo algorithm so that sanctioned tournaments have a full effect but unsanctioned tournaments will have 60% effect on ratings-changes.

Need a web app for overriding ratings when players appeal to governing body. Need to be able to override a 4-digit rating before the week's processing begins. Also need to override 2-digit rounded ratings (which are established/re-rounded/preserved at the end of each week's 4-digit processing).

The web app for overriding ratings will operate on ratings data in the tournament vendor's Perl application - those ratings will be compared to the prior week's ratings to detect changes and relay the changes to the governing body's web site.

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

VP Shaun Davidson was our exclusive contact at Sembit, though I believe he utilized members of the Sembit programming team to assist with this project.

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

Sembit delivered exactly what we asked for -- both a high level analysis as well as a detailed breakdown of this project, and of course a "cost to build" bid.

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

Shaun was very consultative and asked a lot of questions before laying out expectations such as Sembit's bid to complete this task and the timeline on deliverables.

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

We appreciated Shaun's professionalism and how easy it was to communicate with him, especially after having to listen to the other agencies we talked to tell us how great they were while asking us very few questions.

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

We really can't think of any!

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CEO of Enviral Tech. We offer viral surveillance for buildings, primarily focused on COVID-19.

What challenge were you trying to address with Sembit?

We collect samples from our customers’ buildings, test them in our lab, and return results back telling them whether or not we’ve detected a virus in their building. All of that data was being collected in Google Sheets, which was very unstable. 

We reached out to Sembit to create a laboratory information management (LIM) system to collect, analyze, and report our data. 

What was the scope of their involvement?

Sembit built us a LIM system that goes from uploading the data that we’re collecting, all the way through sending the reports out. We continue to work with them on refining it, updating it, and adding features as needed. 

Currently, we’re considering having them put together a portal for us, so that our customers can go onto our website and get the data that way.

What is the team composition?

We work with Nathan (Founder) most often. We also work with Shaun (Vice President) and another team member.

How did you come to work with Sembit?

They came recommended to us by another lab we work with who had partnered with Sembit in the past. 

How much have you invested with them?

We spent roughly $20,000 to get to the beta version, and we’ve spent about $15,000–$20,000 more since then.

What is the status of this engagement?

We hired them in June 2020, and it took them nine days to deliver our alpha version. After that, it took them another five days to refine it so we could launch it fully. We’re still working on updates and adding new features.

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

The LIM has worked really well for us. Sembit was able to deliver something that met our needs within our budget, and they’re working with us to continue to improve it. 

It would’ve been really hard to have gone with any other company. The fact that Sembit was able to deliver in such a short period of time something that we could actually use was remarkable. 

We’ve continued to work with them on a weekly basis to make changes, updates and modifications. They’re always right on target with what we want them to do. Even if we struggle to describe exactly what we want, they’re able to understand us no matter what.

How did Sembit perform from a project management standpoint?

They’re really responsive, which is huge for us because we’re a startup trying to move really fast — especially because we’re delivering results around COVID. It’s really critical for our customers that we’re timely and fast-working, which Sembit is. Also, the team is always available, which is super important. They’re always there to answer the phone, day or night, weekday or weekend.

I’ve really loved working with them. Sembit always delivers what they say they’re going to deliver, in the time they say they’ll deliver it. Whenever we have a deadline for a task delivery, the team gives us detailed and frequent updates about their progress. It’s been a great partnership. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

We’re most impressed with their speed, quality, and accuracy of delivery. When we need something, we can always count on Sembit to be able to deliver. I completely trust them to accomplish what we need accomplished.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I like the idea of having a collaborative project management tool. Right now, we do everything via email or phone calls, and having some dashboard visibility to that would be great.
Also, I think one of the main things I’m missing with Sembit is that they’re not a full-stack engineering and design house. Sometimes it makes it difficult when I have web design things I need to be completed and connected with our backend data systems. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Having really clear specifications or requirements going in will be very helpful. We were very specific about what we needed, which allowed Sembit to go really quickly.

Please describe your company and your position there.

We manufacturer and wholesale lumber products out of the Pacific Northwest to all areas of North American and various international regions. I am the Director of IT for the organization and oversee our business development group.

For what projects/services did your company hire Sembit ?

We reached out to Sembit to design and implement a new order entry application that ties into our existing sales and inventory system.

What were your goals for this project?

We had three primary goals:

1. Reduce data entry errors,
2. improve processing times for users, and
3. Automate integration points associated with third party electronic data interchange connections.

How did you select this vendor?

We have a long tenure with the Sembit, and they have proven to provide cost effective, efficient, and user friendly solutions that have run on stable platforms for over a decade. We selected Sembit as our software vendor to ensure the quality of the product would be impeccable.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

Sembit started by performing a business assessment of our needs and requirements for the interface, and then outlined a strategy and design related to the order entry workflow, and reporting. Upon development, Sembit created the application, managed the source control, and coordinated the deployments for our testing and production environments.

What was the team composition?

The team composition was an overall small group, made up of 1-2 Sembit software developers, along with some internal IT representatives to oversee design, security, and testing, along with internal user groups to provide assessment and feedback to the newly developed application. Sponsorship of this project was overseen by our sales team.

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

Upon initial deployment, our sales team was able to recognize the overall gain in efficiencies in relation to our order entry process. Newer employees were able to increase their order entry submissions by 60%. Over time, with ongoing modifications the sales team now completes 80% of all sales order through the order entry tool, with a consistent decrease of users errors.

99.5% of all orders entered through the order entry tool are clean and free of data entry errors. Significant gains in processing times allows for employees to focus on higher level business decision versus simple repetitive tasks.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

Project managed was managed internally, however Sembit managed and coordinated there resources effectively to stay within designated timeframes.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Sembit brings a very versatile and logical perspective to our projects and solutions. They constantly consider user performance and effectiveness and design solutions to meet the needs of the business along with the user experience. The Sembit staff have a strong experience background and therefore they have the ability to create solutions in an effective and timely manner that helps keep costs reasonable.

Are there any areas for improvement?

No suggestions at this time.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CEO and founder of Master Clinician Network, an online education company that’s been in operation since 2011. We provide clinical videos to students in speech-language pathology programs at universities across the country.

What challenge were you trying to address with Sembit?

We needed help cleaning up and modernizing our website.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Sembit redesigned our website. They went through the code and made bug fixes. The team integrated the site with Stripe for billing purposes and added renewal features. They used Angular and Go.

My company streams video via Vimeo, and Sembit streamlined that process quite a bit. They made the site’s search features more functional. The team also improved user-to-user interaction; for instance, students can post reports, and faculty can easily respond to them.

What is the team composition?

We primarily work with two team members: Nathan (Founder, Sembit), who has worked with us on the overall layout and billing components of the project, and Dean (Software Engineering Consultant, Sembit), who does development. We work with Dean very intensely every day.

How did you come to work with Sembit?

There are a lot of design companies in Portland, Oregon, so we did some online searches on Clutch and other sites. We interviewed around five companies and felt that Sembit was a good match.

How much have you invested with them?

My company has spent close to $100,000 at this point.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our work together began in April 2019, and it’s ongoing.

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

By adding renewal features, we’ve increased revenue by almost 45% over the last couple of months.

How did Sembit perform from a project management standpoint?

Sembit is as good as you can get. The team is timely and very transparent in terms of cost and process. Each week, we receive a clear report that lays out what they worked on over the previous week and how many hours we have left in our monthly budget. They’re spot on.

What did you find most impressive about them?

The biggest thing is that they’ve really taken ownership of the process; it doesn’t feel like they’re working for us, so much as they’re part of the team. While they’re working on one component of the project, they often see something else and get an idea, which they present to us. That’s been invaluable because these ideas usually encompass things we hadn’t considered.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I can’t think of anything.

Any advice for potential customers?

Spend time upfront thinking about what you want and listen to what they have to say. When they make suggestions, take them seriously; they know what they’re talking about. Sembit’s team is intelligent, creative, flexible, and honest. Just paying attention to what they have to say is beneficial to anyone who works with them.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am the president of CreateForLess, which is a division of Petersen-Arne, a craft and sewing supply distribution center. They work with retailers and do business online.

What challenge were you trying to address with Sembit?

Our own programmer took a job with another company, so we decided to outsource that work.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We have over 60,000 different products for sale on our website. We place the orders on our website and then transfer those to the warehouse who ships them out for us. We do all the customer service, handle the returns, and we do the marketing. We have a newsletter and most of our business is organic. We don’t do a lot of marketplace business because our products have a very low price point.

They have made a lot of simple changes on our administrative site, and they have also done bigger projects like cleaning up some of our code. They enhanced a set of admin tools which we use for such functions as canceling orders and running reports.

They also worked on a backorder project. Our website offers items in large quantities, and typically larger quantities than can be found in a retail store. A customer might want 100 to 1,000 of one item, and we didn’t have the ability to have a backorder in our website or the functionality to manage it.

We also had an issue with PayPal. When a customer was hitting a minimum order, it wasn’t providing free freight. They helped us to address customer experience issues like that.

They worked to improve our loading time for web and mobile and assisted with page views. We worked with Google Optimize.

What is the team composition?

We work with Nick (Lead Software Engineer, Sembit), and Nathan (Software Entrepreneur, Sembit).

How did you come to work with Sembit?

I did some research and spoke to friends from my local industry, and they recommended Sembit. They came and met us in person, which impressed us. We met their diverse programming team, which features different types of talent. We thought we would give them some small projects and the relationship grew from that.

How much have you invested in them?

We have spent about $120,000 this year.

What is the status of this engagement?

We began working with them in February 2017, and it is an ongoing relationship.

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

Over the last couple of years, our sales have declined, but that’s been intentional as we’ve chosen to focus on profitable business. We used to accommodate every order. We had low-priced items and a lot of people would order a package of one item which didn’t cover shipping and handling fees, nor the labor cost and freight cost of shipping one package of .69 cent wiggly eyes. Sembit helped us identify which orders were unprofitable and made our sales more efficient.

They’ve cleaned up the older versions of our software and made our website run more smoothly. It was a pretty significant project which we spent quite a bit of money on, but we now have new functionalities which allow us to grow our sales. One of our value propositions to our customers is our capacity to support large orders, and Sembit’s work has expanded that.

We are planning to do a site rewrite this year. We also want to extend our backorder offering to pre-sell products, or offering online sales of products we don’t yet have in stock. We only work with one warehouse right now which is our own, but we are going to branch out and work with some other warehouses, so we need to increase the functionality of the website to be able to ship from multiple warehouse locations.

How did Sembit perform from a project management standpoint?

They have been exceptional and they’re good communicators. If the site has a glitch or a bug, they address it within 15 minutes. If we can’t reach Nick, we can reach Nathan quickly. We all have each other’s personal cell phone numbers, so we can get in contact if we need to. Their understanding of our site and our business has been really impressive. They know where to look and how to be responsive when we have issues. They ask us good questions and sometimes suggest things that we haven’t thought of.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They’re easy to work with. Maybe it is because we are both from Oregon, but we just get along. We don’t get excited, we’re not aggressive—we all listen and understand each other. They know their craft and they are talented.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, we’re completely satisfied.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

They’re the perfect choice for any e-commerce company.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I'm the head of IT for an automotive company.

What challenge were you trying to address with Sembit?

Our e-commerce website was outdated and had security issues, so we were looking for a company to help us enhance our site.

What was the scope of their involvement?

First, they analyzed our website and identified the problems. Then, they mapped out technical and business requirements for our site. They're our preferred vendor when it comes to website support, so they handle most of the new enhancements and expansions of our site.

In addition, they provide recommendations and educate us, helping us understand and improve the user experience. (For example, we didn't want our users to go through 12 clicks to reach the content they needed, so Sembit helped us reduce the number of clicks to two or three.) They also give us feedback about how we can use landscape on our website properly, without adding too much data noise.

Our website is mostly focused on automotive parts for small and medium-sized companies. Our clients have access to their own profiles and can see their credit limits and the status of their orders. We're now adding services, such as repair for robotics and mobile automotive components, so Sembit is helping us deploy those services. They mostly use .NET and Java for development.

What is the team composition?

We've worked with a project manager, their leadership team, and technical resources.

How did you come to work with them?

I worked with them in my previous job in the healthcare industry. They were very responsive and aware when it came to the controls and regulations pertaining to healthcare products and provided proper documentation and testing, so they earned my trust. There are a lot of vendors around, but Sembit is the top choice for us.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them in October 2016 and the relationship is ongoing.

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

Our website used to go down three times a week, but now it's more secure. Also, more and more of our customers visit our website instead of calling our customer service. And when they do call us, they've already gone on the website and understand where they stand.

How did they perform from a project management standpoint?

They go above and beyond for us. They're able to understand our business and deploy solutions without physically be here, which is impressive.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They do their best to understand their clients' needs and take their time to develop a proposal and provide feedback. They're not just looking for work, they want to bring real value to the project they're working on and they'll refuse to do a project that is too high-risk.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Nothing comes to mind.