Silent Infotech Pvt Ltd

Please describe your company and your position there.

Our Company mainly produces drinkware and other promotional and gift products. One of our eCommerce divisions provides unique printing and marking methods. I am President of the Wish Rocket and we have headquarter in Flower Mound Texas.

For what projects/services did your company hire Silent Infotech Pvt Ltd, and what were your goals?

We hired Silent Infotech's team to first analyse our business process and Identify the possible process optimization with ERP like systems. Then we had Silent Infotech's team to implement an integrated cloud based ERP system. And that business ERP needs integrated eCommerce, Sales, Helpdesk and also Warehouse and Web-to-Print based Printing services.

Primary goals behind implementing the ERP like workflow was to streamline the business processes and eliminate the redundant data handling with the best use of cloud based ERP technology.

For overall eCommerce order fulfillment, our Operational staff is required to fetch the details from multiple platforms in order to get all required information. We wanted to implement robust software system replacing the non-communicating piece of current softwares, so that all the manufacturing and order fulfillment processes can be managed from within one common ERP system where our whole team can collaborate on single truth.

How did you select Silent Infotech Pvt Ltd and what were the deciding factors?

We invited many such companies who were having the ERP implementation experience, and we found Silent Infotech team to be fulfilling our multiple goals like they suggested to use Cloud based ERP like Odoo ERP which is Opensouce by nature and globally well-adopted.Also we found their profile strong enough to develop an integrated eCommerce with HTML5 based Designer tool on eCommerce for our customers.

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

Once we selected silent infotech, we had a series of meetings to define the architecture and then decided that what is already available in the Odoo ERP System and what needs to be customized. We finalized the store front design and also set up backend module like CRM, Sales, Inventory management, after sales service(helpdesk) etc.

Silent Infotech Team plans the overall migrations and executes within the weekends and to our surprise we never had any working day when our systems were down. It was a very well planned smooth switchover from our old systems.Similar was the experience when we launched our new eCommerce storefront .

It was so Well integrated with the ERP system and now we have a Sales funneled up with 5 different eCommerce channels integrated seamlessly with our Odoo ERP system which handles the Order Fulfillment and Warehousing and Dropshipping as Well.

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

We were assigned a project manager who was single point of contact person who has served us throughout the project and also there were 2 odoo developers.

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

Every milestones were executions as per plans which were communicated. Transition to this new Odoo ERP system was way faster than we Imagined.

As a next milestone integrating a totally new eCommerce store front with personalisation designer tools took little while to get perfect match to our needs but then gradually we realized they built it was highly customizable, so now on our Sales team is able to manage it Independently publishing new Products and Designs on eCommerce.

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

Project manager from the company was always there to solve any queries and give answers of any questions over call, skype or email. They have always there to work upon any business problems that we talked upon and delivered well planned milestones onto our ERP systems in a way that it occurs zero-downtime for eCommerce as well as Backend ERP systems.

Their key project handling person personally visited our company premises to understand the actual Shop-floor and Warehouse activities. We think that this part of their business analysis was very exhaustive requirement study before implementing the ERP like system and it was very appreciable. Ultimately me as Owner not-needed to be in every minor loop of requirement, its was naturally handled by Silent Infotech's team directly communicating with our Operational manager.

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

I was thoroughly impressed by the base level understanding of the project manager. There were no gaps in any stage of communication throughout the development.

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

Like for anyone in this perfect world, always has a few areas of improvement. I would like to suggest them to add more digital marketing services as we needed to work with the external agencies for that work. Having it integrated under one services banner would be beneficial for the businesses. Meeting the needs of eCommerce Digital marketing along with the Odoo ERP like system for the business would be great.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am the CEO of P1dB. We are a private label RF and microwave electronics distributor.

What challenge were you trying to address with Silent Infotech?

We needed an ERP and CRM platform that could support our business, which is the buying and selling of products. Our sister company had a very useful proprietary system, but it was meant for large companies rather than a small business like mine.

Based on our initial research, we decided Odoo would be the most suitable platform to use. We hired Silent Infotech to help us implement it.

What was the scope of their involvement? 

The initial part of the project focused on defining exactly what we wanted to achieve and laying out all of our objectives. Even though we spent a good amount of time up front, we still missed a lot of things. 

Silent Infotech is a group of very intelligent software experts, but they struggled at first to understand many aspects of our business. 

They have a much better understanding today, though, after we spent a lot of time teaching them why we needed certain things. Once we accurately described what we wanted, they implemented it very effectively.

What is the team composition?

We worked with three people from the team. Subsequently, Silent Infotech sent their main developer over to visit our company in San Jose. The trip was very fruitful.

How did you come to work with Silent Infotech?

We found 10 groups on Upwork that specialized in Odoo implementation. Odoo is a company itself, but their costs were much higher as a US-based team. 

After getting a feel for each vendor, we narrowed down our search to three options that were all based in India. We ultimately chose Silent Infotech to work on this project.

How much have you invested in them?

We invested around $30,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked on this project from July 2016–September 2017.

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

On our old platform, I was paying $1,000 per user each month. I am currently paying $1,500 monthly for five users on the new Odoo platform Silent Infotech created. Their deliverable has cut my cost significantly.

The project took more time and was more expensive to implement than we originally planned, but everyone tells me that’s just the nature of software development. We had wanted to get it done in about three months, but it ended up taking around six.

How did Silent Infotech perform from a project management standpoint?

I think Silent Infotech performed very well. They are always juggling multiple projects, and I had to manage them closely. It was harder to get their attention during certain periods, but we are ultimately very happy with the work they have done.

We most often communicated through collaborative phone calls. Silent Infotech was very flexible and made themselves available to us at all times. Sometimes, working on our schedule even meant they were on the phone with us in the middle of the night.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Silent Infotech used internal tools to track every aspect of the project. I had access to it, so I could input items or email them, and see what was being done. They assigned a dedicated resource to manage it internally, which I appreciated. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

The schedule slipped at times due to changing requirements. Since they had so many projects, I felt like they struggled to jump from one to another.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Invest a lot of time up front to define the requirements. When you think you have the requirements refined, do it again. It is worth it to fly their developer out to your office so they can sit down with you face to face. Once the schedule is defined, make sure they stay on top of it.