Uran Company

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We are an infrastructure distributor in the Netherlands; our job is to add value to the process by making it easier. We deliver solutions for both the enterprise segment and the private, carrier segment. Beyond products, we also create in-house solutions and sometimes make use of the expertise of companies like Uran. As a value-added distributor, we have highly-skilled technicians who provide support and solutions, and who transform commercial wishes from the customer into technical solutions.  

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Uran Company?

We needed someone to write an interface between a highly-complex technical environment, and a customer-friendly end-portal interface, through which they could manage services without being burdened by technical hassles. The client for whom we were building this also wanted to cut out their technical help desk. What they visualized for themselves was a self-service system which was so easy to use that their help desk would hardly ever have to intervene, and, if they did, we needed to create a simplified dashboard for them as well. 

Finally, the client wanted the installation of the product to be simple for residential use. The operator installed devices to end-customers in residential areas, and wanted to have an easy installation procedure for their engineers, without any administrative hassle, and to eliminate the possibility of typing errors while installing and registering new devices at customer locations.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Uran created the help desk technical interface directly and was also able to create an appealing official interface for the end-customer. Uran also created a mobile app which allows the engineer at the residential location to scan the newly-to-be-installed devices, which are automatically placed into the right technical section, in order to start providing services to the end-customer immediately. The end-customer themselves are, from that moment, directly able to change the services being delivered by his or her own choice. The app eliminates the possibility of installation or administrative faults for the operator and eases the installation procedure so much that it can be done in less than 20 minutes, where it would normally take at least an hour. We focused on Android first, and are looking at the opportunity to move to iOS. However, the app is still in the testing phase with our customer, and, for now, an unsigned Android version is the easiest way to go, should there be any bug fixes. We will publish it later in the Google Play Store.

How did you come to work with Uran Company?

We’ve worked with different development companies. We found Uran by accident—they were marketing themselves on a Europe tour and spoke with one of our commercial directors. They were invited to drop by our company for a meeting. When Uran actually came by, there was an opportunity crossing our company, and I thought it would be a good idea to see what they’re really capable of, and do a small test. It was a no-risk opportunity, and we decided to proceed with them, see what they’re made of, how they respond and how flexible they are.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Uran in winter  2016-2017. We’ve started the baselines for a new project, and are quoting it right now. This will be our third project with Uran.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Our customer was very enthusiastic that the project was finished, because of the short timelines. They had no way of creating a product so quickly and to this quality by themselves. They performed beyond expectations.

How did Uran Company perform from a project management standpoint?

We communicated daily by email and Skype.

What did you find most impressive about them?

The communication lines were very short, they have extremely capable programmers and fast response on all communication. They have a profound understanding of customer desires and can visualize our questions by themselves. The team understood how to make the right translation, and present it how we wanted it to be. This is their magic, and how they can make happy customers.

Do you have any advice for prospective customers of Uran?

They’re fast and accurate, which I think is the most important part. I liked working with them.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

The Go Game is a digital scavenger hunt game. It’s a mobile app that allows people to recreate portions of the city. One example is last year we did a kickoff for Game of Thrones for HBO and we transformed portions of Dallas, San Francisco, Austin, and Atlanta with actors that had to do missions. The winner of the missions ended up getting tickets to the premiere. In another case, for a differently themed game in Seattle, the winner won a free year’s rent in downtown Seattle. We also have most of the Fortune 100 companies, for instance, we run a lot of games for Google.

I’m the head of tech and in charge of making sure the platform works and in charge of working with our international partners who are in Dubai, Europe, Asia, and all over the world. I work to make sure we have one platform that works for all of our licensees and ourselves. I make sure the tech works and the product works, work on new enhancements and development, and oversee a staff that is mainly outsourced.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Uran Company?

When I first got here, there were more local staff and not as many remote staff. We had a few developers in the San Francisco office. Bay Area developers are very expensive. A number of people that we could hire locally was a lot less than the teams we could get remotely. If you hire a whole company remotely, you can then get access to specialized tech. That way if you want to do a particular project in a specific technology, it’s much easier to get that skill set than it is to hire someone specifically. For example, before we had Uran, we had a local Ember.js expert and he was $250 an hour. You can get a lot of outsourced developers for $250 an hour.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

I outsource the majority of the development and tech support organization to them. I work with them to create multiple shifts so that they have near 24-hour a day coverage, five days a week. I think it’s up to 21 hours a day. The other great business advantage they have was that because we have international partners, we have support during their hours as well, as opposed to just having 9:00 to 5:00 Pacific time. It started out as tech support and then we moved to our main product, Breadcrumb, and also Game Show. They also helped us with web support and SEO, so it branched out to almost all of the tech within the organization.

Because we’re a game company, we like to give our products interesting names. The gifts we give away most are rubber chickens. We have an unofficial mascot of a rubber chicken. Rubber Chicken is a standalone application that is designed primarily to handle low bandwidth situations. If you look at our players, they go out in the field and they take pictures and videos and photos with our mobile app. There were times when there were bandwidth limitations, and in order to upload all those photos, Rubber Chicken was created to plug the phone in, absorb all the photos and put them up into the photo service we have. It’s also designed as a downloading option. It downloads all photos and creative visions locally to the game runner’s machine so that when they want to do real-time judging, they could do it without worries about bandwidth and bandwidth speed. A lot of times, when they were judging afterward, we showed the output of the creatives that the teams did in a bar or restaurant, but we have notoriously had intermittent internet access.

Uran built an entire app. They picked Electron as a platform. They created the digital signatures in order to distribute it to OS X because we’re all Mac here, and created a standalone program that downloaded it to people’s machines, was able to read from iPhones and Androids, pulled from media folders, downloaded media, and created gallery presentations.

They continue to solve bugs along the way. One of the requirements for Rubber Chicken was that it has an auto update feature. Whenever it opens, it pings the server to see if there are updates out there and automatically updates the code base. Because it’s a desktop application not permanently connected to the web because of a bandwidth solution problem, you can’t assume 100% connectivity and updates are being done. There are regular updates to it and there’s no need to download a new version.

We moved on to other projects like Client Portal, Gallery, and a few other things because Rubber Chicken is mostly done.

They had two primary developers and a couple of backup people. The nice thing about Uran is that I have one main point of contact, the project manager, which allows the encapsulation of how they get it done. They replace their own resources internally. I only deal with the developers if I have to for a specific reason.

How did you come to work with Uran Company?

We found them based more on serendipity than true process. I’ve worked with other organizations where I’ve created entire matrices around quantifying their ability to do a particular tech stack so they quantify their ability to do particular support, asking “What’s the background and history of the company?” This, however, was more of an ad hoc thing. They were in town the same day and they were the first people we talked to. We did some due diligence with other companies. However, it wasn’t a true RFP like I’ve done in the past.

How much have you invested with Uran Company?

We average $8,000 a month with Uran. It’s not super tiny but not huge either.

What is the status of this engagement?

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

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

It was more of a manual process around timestamps. People had to copy the photos over, name them, etc. We tried to match up missions and waypoints based on timestamps versus actual embedding of information of the waypoint media headers. The process went from being 80% effective to near 100% effective. It went from a manual process to plugging in the phone so it could upload the photos. It went from a process of the runner trying to find the games and reconcile them to logging into the application and only seeing his games. There is still some lag around adoption for a couple of issues like scrubbing, but overall, the feedback has been widely positive.

How did Uran Company perform from a project management standpoint?

We had local resources before and a lot of the runners would call the developers here to have issues resolved. We instituted a process with JIRA where we created tickets within the primary product so all the runner has to do is click on a button and fill a JIRA ticket. Uran, a few others, and I monitor the JIRA ticket queue. Since we have multiple shifts, the first person to see the issue responds to it and there’s a much faster response than if you have a specific person you’re calling and they’re not there. The limitations are that they don’t do well on phone calls because their English isn’t perfect, but it’s been good enough through JIRA.

What did you find most impressive about Uran Company?

They’re very flexible. If a new problem comes up, they figure out a way to solve it. I needed 21 hours of tech support, five days a week. I needed them on the schedule to be able to give them projects at any time. They work together with us to get everything done. They’ve been friendly and we have a good working relationship.

For a company our size, our tech stack is surprisingly diverse. A lot of that has to do with the previous tech director. He really likes tech and wanted to explore all the different technologies out there which is great because he learned a lot. But the bad side is there’s a lot of technical debt in a very diverse base to support.

Are there any areas Uran Company could improve?

The previous tech director built the primary frontend of our application in a tech stack called Ember which is a JavaScript framework. It is not as widely adopted as other JS frameworks so it’s been a bit of a struggle to find Ember experts within Uran, but it’s been a challenge to find them anywhere. Uran has been game to try to figure it out, but there are instances where you can tell they’re still trying to figure it out. There’s no particular strong expertise. For the size of our company, the diversity is more important than particular expertise in one particular framework.

What tips or recommendations could you share that might increase the likelihood of success with Uran Company?

We alternate between fixed bid and time and materials projects, and their flexibility is great. But their defined processes aren’t like a CMM level 5 organization where you get true repeatability, true process, and they have strong processes around fixed bid and how they define requirements, scope control, etc. They aren’t as mature as some of the other IT shops out there. But flexibility was more important than maturity in process. They will work with you to find the right answer. They won’t have that repeatable process with high overhead and exact estimation that is the other end of the spectrum for CMM level 5 Indian shops.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Head of Board of Technoline Partners Sp. z o.o.

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Fossil fuels trading.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Uran Company to accomplish?

• Site development

SOLUTION

How did you find Uran Company?

Referral

Why did you select Uran Company over others?

Referred to me

How many teammates from Uran Company were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

• Email and website linked to the domain. 
• Hosting provided.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Website www.technolinepartnets.com created and hosted, emails created @technolinepartners.com

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

• All the items were drlivered in time.
• They meticulously resoponded to all our needs.

What was your primary form of communication with Uran Company?

Email or Messaging App

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

• very quick responce
• quick performance

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

No

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the CEO of Vinto Group

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Digital Marketing

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Uran Company to accomplish?

• E-commerce project' MVP creation
• MVP was successfully launched
• Further funding was obtained

SOLUTION

How did you find Uran Company?

• Online Search
• Referral
• Clutch Site

Why did you select Uran Company over others?

• High ratings
• Pricing fit our budget
• Great culture fit
• Good value for cost
• Company values aligned

How many teammates from Uran Company were assigned to this project?

6-10 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

An online platform where businesses sell their products or services to customers, enabling seamless shopping, secure transactions, and convenient delivery options.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Development will be continued with the funds from investors. I anticipate an annual outcome of approximately $1,000,000.

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

They provided exceptional delivery, on time.

What was your primary form of communication with Uran Company?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

The involvement of each person I have interacted with in working on my project.

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

No

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Co-founder of Kraftblick

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Kraftblick digital agency provides B2B companies with up-to-date digitalization strategy and go-to-market toolset.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Uran Company to accomplish?

• Wed development consulting

SOLUTION

How did you find Uran Company?

Clutch Site

Why did you select Uran Company over others?

• High ratings
• Pricing fit our budget
• Great culture fit
• Good value for cost

How many teammates from Uran Company were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

Uran partner is responsible for e-commerce development services and consulting for a digital agency and our clients. They provided us with detailed requirement specifications and have delivered a number of e-commerce websites upon our request. They also help with support and maintenance.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

The number of good-looking and well-maintained e-commerce websites delivered and launched with the help of Uran.

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

Project management is excellent. They deliver on budget on time. Communication style is empathetic. Proactivity is what I like the most about them.

What was your primary form of communication with Uran Company?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

I'm impressed with their proactive approach, which makes them a development partner rather than a contractor.

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

I am fine with everything they do.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the sales manager of Technoline Partners

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Trading

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Uran Company to accomplish?

• company website creation

SOLUTION

How did you find Uran Company?

Other

Why did you select Uran Company over others?

Other

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

I have been working with Uran for 15 years now. I initially ordered a corporate website for the factory where I worked, and then the company developed a custom intranet/internet portal for the factory to conduct tenders. The work was always done precisely according to the requirements, and the company's specialists offered elegant solutions. Our collaboration lasted for several years.

I was satisfied with the engagement with Uran Company. In 2023, I approached Uran again with a project on WordPress, and once again my expectations of working with the company were fully met.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

• I don't know

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

Project was in time. Once again my expectations of working with the company were fully met.

What was your primary form of communication with Uran Company?

Email or Messaging App

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

Professional, relationships and working for goal

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

I don't know

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

We are a manufacturer of paints, coatings, and construction chemicals. I am the managing director.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

Our goal was to develop web-based software and a driver to use a POS machine that is used for tinting paint.

SOLUTION

How did you select Uran Company and what were the deciding factors?

Based on the offer, what they had to offer, and their portfolio.

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

They designed and developed the web-based app as per our requirements and the technologies used for our project were suggested by them since we trusted their choices and their experience.

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

Four people from their team were in direct contact with me throughout the project.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Based on our requirements for the software, I can say they over-delivered.

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

We have mainly communicated via email and skype. It was efficient and to the point every time.

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

They were easy to talk to, understandable, and delivered a service that had a great price-quality ratio.

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

Not until now.