Sumeru Inc

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m an administrative support associate with the Business Partners Program at USC Charlotte.

What challenge were you trying to address with Sumeru Inc?

We have a free Salesforce license, and we’re not large enough to have backend architects onboard to handle the internal processes. We reached out to Sumeru Inc to help out with some of those backend processes.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Sumeru Inc fixed some of our existing event registration management processes and upgraded some of our Salesforce instances. They were also able to give us additional hours of consulting and developmental tasks. They did an architectural review with us. 

We had a call with an architect on their team, and we went through some of the issues that we were having and the fixes that they gave us. Then, they walked us through what they did and some of the instances. They came up with great ideas on how to move forward with some of the things we were doing, as well as some things to make them a little more robust for the customers.

With only two people on our team, Sumeru Inc was really great about giving us ideas to help us utilize Salesforce, as we hadn’t been using it to its maximum capacity. They made suggestions and showed us how to implement them.

What is the team composition?

I mostly work with Aman (Venture Capital Analyst), and then an architect joins the calls. There have been several people from Sumeru Inc’s team involved in getting this up and running for us.

How did you come to work with Sumeru Inc?

One of our former students had been instrumental in building some of our Salesforce, and he’s now working with Salesforce. Since it was a conflict of interest for him, he couldn’t help, but he referred us to Sumeru Inc. Our former student and Sumeru Inc work on a nonprofit together.

I reached out to Sumeru Inc, and they were more than willing to help us. A lot of the work was done pro bono at the beginning of the project, but since we were asking for additional work, we decided as an institution to sign up for their services and bring them on. We liked what they were doing and the direction they were taking us in. They were so gracious and signed us up with a nonprofit educational discount, so we couldn’t say no to letting them help us.

How much have you invested with them?

We have invested $3,600 so far.

What is the status of this engagement?

We had initial talks toward the end of September 2020, but we got things rolling in October 2020. We don’t need full implementation until we open anything in mid-November 2020, so we’re on a really good timeline with them. It’s ready to roll out; we just haven’t done it yet.

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

Their service is invaluable to us. When our Salesforce went down, I had to do everything manually. I spent hours manually reaching out to our contacts and partners. We really needed to find someone to help us rebuild it.

I was so grateful that our former student referred us to Sumeru Inc. The ideas that they came up with to help us in the future are going to save us a lot of time. We have so many touchpoints with our partners, so it’s great that they can automate that service. They’re going to work with me one-on-one to help me understand the backend of Salesforce better. That’s built into the service they’re providing, which I’m also grateful for. It’ll be extremely helpful to me.

How did Sumeru Inc perform from a project management standpoint?

Aman has been good at keeping us updated on where they are in the process and answering emails in a timely manner. The invoicing is great for us as a nonprofit.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Overall, Sumeru Inc is really great to work with. They provide great updates so that we know where they are in the process, which is really helpful. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

No. They’ve got it down pretty good. They know what they’re doing.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

The team is so personable and just on top of everything. I can’t think of anything that they could do anything better.