VM.PL Software House

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the CEO & Partner of Merways GmbH

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Developing digital green transformation solution services like our Merways Mehrweg-App or our ecobono platform for online and offline CO2 compensation for companies.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire VM.pl Software House to accomplish?

• Extend our developing capabilities with special focus on technologies like Flutter and Kotlin Spring Boot

SOLUTION

How did you find VM.pl Software House?

Online Search

Why did you select VM.pl Software House over others?

• Good value for cost
• Smart & responsive people, the right skill set, longterm co-operation

How many teammates from VM.pl Software House were assigned to this project?

4

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

The task was to further develop our Merways re-useables app and add a feature that allows consumers to use the app when ordering food via a food delivery service such as Lieferando, Wolt or UberEats.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The project was completed in time with good and smart ideas from the VM team, but we had difficulties in exporting the flutter app into an iOS Version. This caused nearly two months of delay to fix it.

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

Developers at VM.PL and the project managers did a great job and were flexible in the choice of the applied management tools. We had a good overview and were involved frequently.

What was your primary form of communication with VM.pl Software House?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

We enjoyed their open communication, the flexibility and quick reactions as well as the immediate understanding of our situation and our business needs.

Are there any areas for improvement or something VM.pl Software House could have done differently?

We (both parties) need to solve issues like with the runner on the iOS machine more quickly

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the CEO of ergosoft GmbH

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Developing software and providing full range digital services around the psychotherapeutic practice.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire VM.pl Software House to accomplish?

• Expanding development capacities
• Filling gaps in technology skills and coding languages

SOLUTION

How did you find VM.pl Software House?

Other

Why did you select VM.pl Software House over others?

• Close to my geographic location
• Great culture fit
• Good value for cost
• Company values aligned

What was the size of VM.pl Software House’s team?

1 Employee

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

The task was to translate our proven desktop application into a browser-based version of our software and to modernize it in the process.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The project is not yet completed, but we are on track to have a modern software that meets the market requirements.

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

From the beginning, the developers at VM.PL, as well as the project managers, were able to convince us of their flexibility. We always had an overview of costs and timelines. Deadlines were always met.

What was your primary form of communication with VM.pl Software House?

• In-Person Meeting
• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

In addition to their technological capabilities, we were impressed by the open corporate culture and internationality.

Are there any areas for improvement or something VM.pl Software House could have done differently?

Our requirements for the profile of new developers were sometimes quite specific in the past. We are confident that with even better collaboration during the recruitment process, we will be able to find suitable candidates more quickly.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the Division Manager for Software development in our Product R&D department. We produce machines for woodworking business and industry and the software for these machines and application for our customers processes.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire VM.pl Software House, and what were your goals?

Vm.pl supports our development team with developing projects or components for our applications. The goal is to free our team so that they can concentrate on high-value domain software. The team of Vm.pl supports us in speeding up our development roadmap.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

We have had a good feeling with VM.pl right from the start. The developers are competent and the back office is straightforward, friendly and fast.

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

The project is developed in C# .NET 6 and we decided to use a agile development process.

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

There are 2 developers working as Team, where one Developer has the lead position. The Architecture decisions are agreed together with our company. The UsesCases where defined by our company and the Issues created together with VM.pl.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The development speed is equal or faster then planned at project start. The quality and output is quite perfect fitting to our internal development rules.

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

We use JIRA and Confluence for projectmanagement and documentation and Slack as communication tool.

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

VM.pl reacts fast and is always available to provide support when we need them. A continous feedback is done.

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

Currently the cooperation is perfect fitting on our requirements.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Our company is an importer, distributor and wholesaler of alcoholic beverages. Our primary market at present time is Germany.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire VM.pl Software House, and what were your goals?

We were looking for an EDI interface in order to automate reception and processing of orders of major clients.

SOLUTION

How did you select VM.pl Software House and what were the deciding factors?

We have worked with VM.PL on a previous project and were satisfied with the quality of the work delivered. Deciding for us was as well that the same employee who we knew already and who is familiar with our IT environment, was available for this project.

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

Following the analyis of our requirements specification, VM.PL came up with a software architecture which would fulfill our requirements. Also, based on their suggestions, we could actually reach a better solution than expected, like by implementing Chrome plugins.

How many people from the VM.pl Software House team worked with you, and what were their positions?

We have two main contacts, being the project manager and the lead software architect & programmer.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The processing of orders via EDI reduces the workload on our customer service team significantly. The implemented solution is well-performing and resilient, thus providing a significant value-add into our daily operations.

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

We communicated mainly by email and via bi-weekly Teams calls. Communication is very efficient, characterized by direct exchanges and discussions about possible solutions, which leads to fast project progress.

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

They are very professional and competent staff, yet very down-to-earth and colloquial working style. Very uncomplicated to work with, they care about our requirements and are looking for solutions which are in many cases even better than what we specified. Direct communication and fast implementation, open-minded and flexible.

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

I guess the only topic is the limited availability of our software architect / lead programmer. We would love to have more of his weekly share of hours dedicated to our project. On the other hand, the time line of this project has not been critical, so it has not been a major topic in this project.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am project manager at a Company, providing software solutions and consulting for manufacturing processes, including visualization, optimization, automation and equipment integration.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire VM.pl Software House, and what were your goals?

VM.pl was hired to get support in the whole development process including software architecture, software development and software test. Goals were a stable software development process with a stable team of internal and external experts enabling a large distributed team to be efficient and effective.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

During the years, working together, a very close contact to developers and managers has developed. During our cooperation more and more developers were hired, not only for the my project. Hired people are very well trained and very aproachable. The results are of high quality.

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

Scope of work is distributed over the whole software development process, beginning by discussion of requirements with the client, providing software architecture and embedded in the whole system architecture, developing the source code up to testing the software product. In software creation process different technologies are used from .Net, JAVA, Angular to Selenium or QF-Test and different script languages.

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

Currently in the project 9 colleagues from VM.pl are working in the project.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Throughout the current project and the very complex system, new colleagues are very fast in the onboarding process and are able to deliver countable work very fast. So, VM.pl colleagues are doing a great job and help us developing the system in a shorter timeframe.

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

VM.pl colleagues are used to work in a very agile way. They also help us to get better in our development process and use agile methods consequently in the team.

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

Most impressive is the way, they are working with us. They are fully interested in our success and colleagues are evaluated permanently by VM.pl. Often, they are already working on shortcomings before we have mentioned to them. Their internal training is very effective and shows a fast improvement.

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

Not yet.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Pacemo is the leading cloud provider for the funeral industry and develops and operates modern software products for everyday use in funeral homes throughout the German-speaking region.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire vm.pl Software House, and what were your goals?

VM.PL supports us in the development of existing and new applications. The biggest challenge was to bring our existing system from an old tech stack up to date and not to interrupt day-to-day operations. We use agile software development methods that work extremely well in cooperation with vm.pl.

SOLUTION

How did you select vm.pl Software House and what were the deciding factors?

The cooperation with vm.pl came about through a network of friends and I got in touch with Lukasz the CEO and then with the actual developers. On the basis of an induction phase, we have checked the cooperation and continue to do so with new team members. The cooperation works particularly well here, as we are also looked after by customer support and our requests are taken into account.

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

The cooperation exists to support the further development of our core application. In the first phase, it was about support in bug fixing, small improvements and in the meantime we have revised large parts of the core application and brought it to a completely new, technological level. Our colleagues from VM.PL were always at our side with their advice.

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

A customer advisor is available to us at all times and so far two developers.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

At VM.PL I experience proactive communication, an understanding of agile methods and friendly and open feedback.

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

The corporate culture of VM.PL appears to me as a customer to be very open, friendly and human. The employees have the opportunity to work freely and proactively and thus to accompany their customers in the best possible way.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I’m a system engineer for Welotec GmbH. We are a solution provider for IT and OT (operations technology) communication in critical infrastructures. We also specialize in digitization and cloud integration.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire vm.pl Software House?

We hired the team to re-engineer an existing device management platform.

What were your goals for this project?

The main goal was to set the existing software on a new foundation. We wanted to integrate a framework, increase the security level, and enhance the performance. Furthermore, we wanted to improve the UX based on feedback from customers.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

The team contacted us directly via email and explained their service offerings. A few weeks later, one of their employees came to visit us. Their pricing model appealed to us, and we liked the idea of hiring a specialized development team for a specific project.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

We provided the existing source code, documentation, and test applications. They met with us for two days to discuss the project plan. Then, vm.pl began implementing the solution.

What was the team composition?

The team consisted of four employees: a project manager, two developers, and one project administrator who performed accounting tasks.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We are now able to offer our customers an improved, all-in-one solution. Furthermore, we have been able to develop additional software based on the device management platform they created. This new software has helped us open a whole new market.  

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

They managed the project by sharing documents and graphics on Google Drive. They used Bitbucket to manage the source code. In the future, we will use Jira to track bugs.

The team was very professional from the beginning. The suggestions they’ve provided aligned with what we needed.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

I was impressed by how knowledgeable the developers were. They had an excellent understanding of our goals, and their suggestions were a value-added. They were able to understand a complex application use-case very quickly. 

Are there any areas for improvement?

We ran into small errors in the documentation they created for us. However, overall, we were very happy to work with vm.pl Software House.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CTO and a co-founder of Advalyze. Our main focus is on modernizing classic businesses to perform digital transformations. 

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with vm.pl Software House?

We’ve worked with vm.pl Software House to support several of our clients, mainly in the IT area. They have specialized expertise in AngularJS and Node.js.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

One of our projects together was for a German electricity company. The client wanted to test a new way of selling electricity on the market by using an app with gamification elements. vm.pl Software House was responsible for developing the backend APIs. They also built an admin interface that allows us to manage users and perform other tasks.
 
What is the team composition? 

For most of our projects, we generally work with 1–2 teammates from vm.pl Software House. We’ve interacted with about 5–6 different people in total. The average size of our in-house team ranges from 3 to 15 employees.
 
How did you come to work with vm.pl Software House?

vm.pl Software House initially wrote to me on Xing, a German portal for business contacts. We were looking for AngularJS developers at the time. After we met them, we started a collaboration.
 
How much have you invested with them?

The projects have ranged in cost between €50,000–€1,000,000 (approximately $56,000–$115,000,000 USD),
 
What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in February 2016. All our projects are complete, but we’ll go back to them as soon as we have the need.  

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Based on my review of core parts of the deliverables, vm.pl Software House’s work is state of the art. I have no complaints about the quality of their software, and neither do my clients.
 
How did vm.pl Software House perform from a project management standpoint?

We manage the initial parts of most projects with vm.pl Software House through email and occasional phone calls. When we start a new project, we usually have a kick-off meeting with the team.  After that, we communicate exclusively over Slack.
 
What did you find most impressive about them?

vm.pl Software House is always eager to solve our problems and satisfy our needs. I think it’s awesome that whenever we need a specific resource, they’re enthusiastic about finding just the right person. 
 
Are there any areas they could improve?

No, not from my perspective. vm.pl Software House does a very good job.
 
Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

vm.pl Software House is a great choice for clients who need individual or teams of developers who deliver code on time.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I’m the head of computer science at The Society for Academic Study Preparation and Test Development. We’re a nonprofit recognized for its German testing and higher education aptitude test.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire vm.pl Software House?

We needed to develop a digital platform for e-assessments that supported DUO functionalities (an e-learning platform).

What were your goals for this project?

The platform had to allow us to create and input exam items, support web-based assessments, and feature media management tools.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

vm.pl contacted us. After doing our own research and comparing them with several other companies, we had a favorable impression of them.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

They’ve assigned software developers to assist us with a number of tasks including extending our complex system for creating and editing exam items. Their other efforts revolve around continued development of our e-learning platform, the introduction of new technologies, and QA. 

What was the team composition?

We work with five Java developers.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We wouldn’t be able to achieve our milestones without vm.pl’s developers. Throughout the cooperation, they’ve shared their technical knowledge with our in-house developers.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

It’s well organized, and vm.pl is very responsive to inquiries. They’re always ready to take in-person meetings to communicate more directly.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

We’ve had open and honest exchanges about our cooperation and ways to improve it.

Are there any areas for improvement?

The developer selection process could be even more focused. Some candidates haven't possessed the necessary language skills, which wasn’t apparent from the profiles we were provided with. Overall, however, hardly anything needs to be improved.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I’m the head of IT for ElbeZeit GmbH, a tourism company located in East Germany. We provide cruises on the Elbe river for roughly half a million passengers per year. In my role, I’m responsible for the IT infrastructure as well as the development of our web-based online systems such as our ticketing software, online shop, and home page.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire vm.pl Software House?

We were looking for resources who were familiar with Magento 2 and its ecosystem. Since our previous agency couldn’t deliver as expected, we needed web developers who had excellent technical knowledge, understood our quality standards, and could work independently.

What were your goals for this project?

We hoped to resolve all bugs in our online shop and implement new features. In addition to selling more traditional products such as souvenirs, we wanted the online shop to sell tickets for our cruises. Furthermore, vm.pl Software needed to connect our backend systems through APIs.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

We found them via a newsletter and met with them at our headquarters in Germany. After talking with them, we were impressed by their commitment and willingness to help us as soon as possible. They were also able to converse with our CEOs and project team in German, which was a big plus.

Can you go into detail about the services they provided and the scope of the project?

When interviewing resources, they initially presented a selection of developers to choose from along with reviews and sample work. Their CEO asked us to not only consider the person's past projects but also their language skills.

Once we picked a developer, we described the project via email and video chat because we lacked written documentation. The developer grasped our ideas quickly and began working on the project immediately. We’ve since launched the site, and vm.pl Software House continues to provide resources across different fields as needed.

What was the team composition?

For the online shop, they supplied a full-time developer for a couple of days per week.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Thanks to their help, we were able to launch the online shop within the planned schedule, which would’ve been unlikely with our previous agency. As a result, we’ve improved our online sales volume.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

I handled the project management myself.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

I appreciated their dedication to the project. They understood the customer’s journey and assisted at every point of the software development process.

Are there any areas where they can improve?

No, not that I can think of.