Andersen

Please describe your company and your position there.

We're one of the world's leading specialists in the field of data-driven business technologies. We're trusted by global market leaders across a wide variety of industries, including automotive, consumer goods, and ICT. We also offer a growing portfolio of AI-powered business intelligence solutions.

At our locations in Berlin, Beijing, and Munich, around a hundred data scientists, creative strategists, futurologists, consultants and designers share a common vision: to explore the unexplored in our data-driven world. In my role as CTO I supervise all product- and development-related work.

For what projects/services did your company hire Andersen?

We hired Andersen to extend our development capabilities for two of our products. As our internal capacities were already fully committed, we required additional development skills for web frontend and backend work.

What were your goals for this project?

Develop, extend and maintain a scalable, userfriendly and performant data-driven platform. New developers had to be onboarded into the existing code (ReactJS, Angular, Ruby, MongoDB), architecture, and agile Scrum processes.

How did you select this vendor?

Selection process included quality and cost considerations. Each developer from Andersen underwent interviews and a code challenge, before being accepted into the project.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

The product was already past MVP stage and needed further feature development, maintenance, and support. Extensive documentation and onboarding was provided as part of the process.

Development followed Scrum methodology, and developers participated actively in all ceremonies. Management of development was handled inhouse (Product Owner, Scrum Master, UX), and developers aligned as part of development teams on technical details.

Generally, developers were also involved in technical feedback and evaluation of new feature suggestions in a very early state, and were able (and encouraged) to propose their own ideas. Typical tasks included coding, code reviews, architecture alignments, Scrum ceremony participation.

What was the team composition?

Product development consisted of 3 teams, with about 6 developers (3x web frontend, 3x backend) and 1 QA engineer. There were 1 dedicated PO and SCM for all 3 teams. Teams were nearshoring located primarily in Central Europe. Chat and video conferencing was used for alignment.

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

The products that were developed are now the cornerstones extending our service portfolio. We extended work orders over years to keep development velocity and quality. Results exceeded our expectations, and feedback from our clients on the solutions is very positive.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

Project management was handled inhouse, not by development partner.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

From a development standpoint, the code quality was high, and they were involved and highly motivated to contribute to our products. They are very acute and aware of any impact a proposed implementation approach could have. We received valuable insights and suggestions from them.

On an account management level, we received fast and reliable feedback on any of our queries, and our (spontaneous) requests were met to our full satisfaction.

Are there any areas for improvement?

There is very little to improve. Approval procedure as legally required by their government is a bit cumbersome but out of their control.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CTO of Kickico, a community-based, blockchain fundraising ecosystem for FinTech products.

What challenge were you trying to address with Andersen?

We needed some help and advice on our QA process.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Andersen provides manual QA engineers for regression, smoke, and current-task testing. We’re planning to implement automatic testing, as well.

What is the team composition?

We have three QA engineers from Andersen.

How did you come to work with Andersen?

They’re a popular QA testing company, and I knew of them from other projects.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent $50,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Andersen around November 2018, and it’s ongoing. We plan to involve more engineers from their side as we expand our scope.

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

They’ve helped us build up our QA process, and we’ve gotten some good advice from them.

How did Andersen perform from a project management standpoint?

Our projects are very dynamic, and we have an ideal tempo. The communication with the Andersen team is also great. We’re using management systems like Jira and TestRails.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Because they’re organized and responsive, they’re able to solve our problems and address our questions quickly.

 Are there any areas they could improve?

There isn’t much to improve, but it would be interesting if they took part in generating requirements for our projects. However, that’s not possible for now, since they have a lot of work.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

They provide good-quality services and a wide breadth of specialists. Clients can feel confident that they’ll succeed if they work with Andersen.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the engineering and product manager at Greenwald Industries, a division of The Eastern Company. We’re in the commercial laundry market, although we target other markets as well. We began in the coin-operated laundry space and then moved into card-based systems. We’re currently shifting to phone apps and IoT. 

What challenge were you trying to address with Andersen?

We hired Andersen to help us with app development. We had phone apps from a previous product that needed some refreshing, and we also needed assistance with new development efforts.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Generally, my team puts together marketing requirements, documents, and system architecture specs, and Andersen runs with the design using those materials as a reference. We have a couple of working models with them. The first is ongoing maintenance, where Andersen works with our iOS and Android apps to do minor bug fixes or enhance features. We have an old iOS app written in Objective-C, and Andersen is in the process of redesigning that and porting it to Swift. They develop our Android apps using Java. This is a slow-rolled approach and keeps costs down. 

The second working model covers new development that we need to move on quickly. They’ve helped us create a whole new approach to doing a render lists module on a machine and having the phone be the UI and network connection to the outside world. They also created different app designs for customers and administrative users. The app takes different forms based on login credentials. For instance, it gives administrators the ability to set up machines, load firmware, or do physical collections of money from the machine.

Andersen does testing to ensure that the devices they’re developing work with our products. We had them purchase reference systems and then provided them with firmware to run on those systems that would emulate the actual devices. In this regard, they’re doing more than just app development; their work is somewhat specialized because they need to understand how to communicate with the Bluetooth stack. They’ve been able to get us past the hurdles we’ve found along the way. 

What is the team composition?

They assign teams to our projects. We work with a project manager, an architect, developers, and QA people. For the newer development projects that we do with Andersen, they generally provide bigger teams. 

How did you come to work with Andersen?

I did an internet search and came across many different phone app development companies, and Andersen’s name was at the top of the list. We’d been using some local phone app development firms but found that Andersen had a better team and quality approach, so we decided to hire them.

How much have you invested with them?

Our monthly invoices vary.

What is the status of this engagement?

We’ve been working with them for a couple of years now, and we’re engaging them with new stuff right now. We’re constantly reinventing ourselves, and Andersen is there to help us out along the way. 

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

Things come out pretty much as expected, so we’ve been happy with them. We’ve had very good commentary from our customers about everything. 

How did Andersen perform from a project management standpoint?

We have weekly meetings and communicate via email numerous times a day, so we always know what’s going on. They’re good about putting other project managers in place if one is on vacation so that things don’t stop.

What did you find most impressive about them?

The takeaway is whether we’re still using them, and we are.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, probably not. I’ve leveraged this company and others to have pair programming, but it’s skewed by time zones. This is helpful because we can do continuous development and testing. One of the key ways to reduce scheduling is to have development happening not just for eight hours each day, but for 24. 

Any advice for potential customers?

Have good requirements and stay in communication.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the founder and CEO of a startup rideshare platform. 

What challenge were you trying to address with Andersen?

I came up with the business concept for our web app, but don’t have a technical background. So, we brought in Andersen to complete our development.

What was the scope of their involvement?

I conceptualized how the app would work, the UX, and the business concept, but they created an architecture diagram to demonstrate how it would work. Once we were happy with the design, they began developing the app, ensuring that the app was scalable and robust enough to integrate with our large partners. The platform is hosted on AWS, and they developed the backend using Java, and the frontend using React.

What is the team composition?

There are five people working on the project full-time and one person who works part-time.

How did you come to work with Andersen?

They were recommended to me by the CTO of a large company who praised their technical capabilities.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent about €65,000  (approx. $75,000).

What is the status of this engagement?

We started the project in June 2019 and it is ongoing.  

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

Our MVP is on track to be completed by the end of the month, ahead of schedule and under budget. They’ve gone beyond the requirements we outlined at the beginning of the project. By challenging what I asked them to do and proposing even better solutions than what I imagined, they’ve created a product we’re really happy with.

They continue to develop new pipelines and test for bugs. Although we don’t have a final product yet, all of their demos have been great. We’ve been really impressed by their work and plan to keep developing a strategic partnership with them.

How did Andersen perform from a project management standpoint?

They worked in sprints, and they’ve hit their target for almost every sprint. They’ve only allowed tasks to roll over into the next sprint twice, and it hasn’t impacted the amount of work they complete. We have daily calls, and I can always contact them on Skype. Our project manager continuously updates Jira and provides us with cost breakdowns.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They have a strong grasp of what we want and are really engaged in the project. Their ability to understand our challenges and deliver solutions surpasses all of the other development companies I’ve worked with.

At the beginning of our engagement, I expected to face communication challenges because English isn’t their first language. However, we haven’t had any issues.

Are there any areas they could improve?

There’s nothing they need to improve.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Start development. We’ve already recommended them to other startups.  

Please describe your company and your position there.

OurCnC company was established in 2015. From the very beginning, the main concept of a product was to create a platform for peer-to-peer car sharing. After OurCnC started cooperating with Europcar in 2016, the new concept of white-label platform for a car rental was created. For now, the main strategy of OurCnC is to sell IPR (intellectual property rights) for its platform for the customer’s company and make all other functions outsourced. I am President of the Company.

For what projects/services did your company hire Andersen?

In the last years, a lot of car rental or car-sharing services created special apps to provide car renting via smartphone. I came to Andersen for creating the same solution - a good app for renting cars which many companies could use. It should have been a clear system that can be customized according to the special requirements of every company. It should be flexible and well-organized, with a very small time of implementation, so the company-customer only needs to create a design template to get a working product.

What were your goals for this project?

Create the most convenient platform for International Car-Rental companies. Application and Management Panel

How did you select this vendor?

Andersen team was fully involved in the development process to create a Mobile App for IOS and Android and a web Management panel system. We started everything from scratch 3,5 years ago and all this time the company has been providing all the specialists needed to create documentation and design, manage the development process, create a product and test its quality. We have very strong communication during all these years and the team is always very flexible and well-organized.

Describe the project in detail.

React Native application and management panel From scratch to end. We outsourced all the development work. SRS was based for Car-rental companies needs.

What was the team composition?

This project was started with the team partially from Andersen and partially from Finnish freelancers. But during the project’s growth I found out that Andersen’s team is really effective and we came to the full team from Andersen. Currently, it is 2 developers full-time, QA, BA, and PM are part-time. We suppose to continue work with this team for a long time.

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

With Andersen, we created a new well-working product that OurCnC will base marketing politics on. We paired up with a big car rental company for developing and piloting this product and got great reviews. Now we are planning to go to the market with the result of this project and get more customers.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Andersen provided very talented project managers, they keep up to approved development plan, so all functionality is made on time, create clear reports and have very good communication skills and fluent English. We use Jira as a tracking system, Skype and Slack as tools for communication with the team. All processes are well-organized and performed correctly.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

The team is always on time and dedicated to the project. They help to improve the product.

Are there any areas for improvement?

No, everything is great.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

Luno is a crypto exchange that’s mostly distributed throughout the world. Our engineering and operations team is based in Cape Town and our head office is in London.

Our platform is for people that want to buy cryptocurrencies in a safe, secure manner. We are a custodial exchange that takes away a lot of the complexity that comes with interacting with currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum.

What challenge were you trying to address with Andersen?

We have a relatively new and open-sourced architecture, and our backend language is Go. Globally, the popularity of Go far exceeds the number of engineers who actually have experience with it. We hired Andersen because they had a good bench of Go resources that we needed on the backend engineering side. The second consideration was that, equally, on the Android side, finding engineers with Kotlin experience was harder than expected. Andersen was again able to solve this problem for our team.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We’d had 1­–2 months of interaction before they gave us engineers. At the time of engagement, we had a few people on our Android and backend teams. The vision of the architecture, the direction of the product, and features build-out were on our side. Bringing Andersen on was initially about ramping up an ongoing project.

Their team first needed to understand our architecture. Initially, our engagement was spent on getting their engineers to know our environment and making sure they understand the crypto space, beyond just engineering specs. Since there aren’t many crypto exchanges around, our rules of operation aren’t widely known.

We found that engineers started running their own projects quickly, taking complete ownership of developing bank integrations and payment aggregators.

On the Android side, the engineers spent their time rewriting our app in Kotlin. They became a significant contributor to our platform team.

What is the team composition?

We started with two people. At the moment, we’re working with six engineers. On top of that, I’ve been in touch with the account manager and someone on the technical side. I believe 1–2 others came and went along the way. At one point, they tried providing a project manager to assist with coordination during the initial ramp-up phase. They handle the account management, while we are focused on the project management coordination.

How did you come to work with Andersen?

In December 2017, Bitcoin’s price was driving our customer numbers at a rapid pace, and we needed contingency in our engineering capacity. The markets were going wild, and we were preparing for a massive capacity increase. I went on LinkedIn and researched the Go experience. Andersen came out on top.

As far as LinkedIn statistics go, they had the most engineers. I interacted with several organizations capable of providing competent engineers. Out of all the organizations, Andersen sent the most CVs, and could actually prove their skillset. After researching more, we went with Andersen because they delivered on what they promised.

How much have you invested with them?

Andersen has a “risk-free” model, by which we were given a few engineers to test out for a few weeks. We knew from the start that we would need 4–6 months’ worth, and jumped into a fairly economic hourly rate of $32. This depending on their seniority. All other costs for travel were on our side, which we decided to incur to get the team to our offices for initial onboarding.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them around two years ago.

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

Andersen is currently our only contingent supplier. They’ve taken on very big projects, moving quickly. Despite having engineers in different countries, communication has been great. We run an agile framework, measuring it by cadence or velocity, but their biggest asset to me is that they take ownership of projects and communicate directly with some of our third-party integrators. 

How did Andersen perform from a project management standpoint?

Since we’ve insourced them into our existing team, we manage them. Running in Agile, we’ve integrated all six of Andersen’s engineers into our teams. We treat them as our own.

What did you find most impressive about them?

When it comes to general communication, the team at Andersen is extremely professional. Through meetings with their account managers where we discuss issues and concerns, I’ve gotten the impression that they invest in their engineers's personal development.

I have 22 years of engineering experience, and, in the early days, I did work with a lot of teams in India. A lot of the companies had an associate system with strong career paths. The deliverables were done with the utmost professionalism.

Andersen works very similarly to that model. They treat their engineers like associates. Since they’re a large organization, I imagine that they’re at the point where this is the only way that they can scale. On day one, we started with two people, and have grown within the last year.

Whenever I need to add another member, the speed at which they source their bench is pretty remarkable. Andersen maintains a constant flow of engineers that are ready and willing to jump into work for a company. It can be tough to find quality Android engineers around the globe. They have a good contact pool of expert engineers because they moved quickly when I asked for seniors.

Are there any areas they could improve?

While we predominantly use Slack, we do have videoconferencing. Sometimes there is a language barrier during face-to-face communication, but there have been no issues with written correspondence through Slack.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

I’d advise starting small by bringing the team on-site for one or two months to help them understand the culture. They have to feel like they’re part of the team, so there needs to be great one-to-one oversight. We’ve recently promoted one of their people to team lead and have gotten our culture embedded in their office now. They even do a lot of onboarding themselves.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am a Co-founder at Belkins. We are a trusted B2B lead generation and appointment-scheduling agency, with a presence in over 30 countries. We offer a comprehensive range of sales and business development processes including company research, B2B outreach programs, and lead qualification.

For what projects/services did your company hire Andersen?

Since we are a sales agency, obviously we don't have much technical experience in the field. Instead of hiring and maintaining in-house engineering team we found Andersen to help us to develop a CRM solution for our SDR team to manage a load of manual work that usually agencies like us have.

What were your goals for this project?

We needed a solution which was plug-and-play as well as have someone from the vendor's team to run the maintenance. Also, since CRM wasn't our care business competency we had an allocated budget which we can not exceed.

How did you select this vendor?

We were approached by Andersen sales team, after which we set up a f2f meeting and after a workshop with their project management team, we decided to pull the trigger.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

Andersen team is our strategic partner for any internal development. They helped us to select the best technology stack. We now use koa, * apollo *, * graphql *, * typedi *, * pg *, * Vue.js *. Afterward, we worked with their product manager and design team and engineers for 2 creating a prototype and MVP. After the first version of the product was released we spent another 2 months to finalize all the features and launched a version 2.0 which we are currently using without having any major issues.

What was the team composition?

The project team was about 5 people: product manager, UI/UX designer, backend and frontend developers a QA tester.

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

We tried other development teams before moving in with Andersen and they failed, all of them were reactively developing the platform instead of proactively running the developing. With Andersen, we had a great experience so far. I think they have superior technical knowledge as well as a good communication style. By the way, their engineers are advanced English speaker, so we had no issues of understanding one other.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

We used Jira, GitHub, Slack. We also were involved in daily/weekly standups and were provided with a 24/7 overview of current development springs and completed tasks.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

While doing due diligence I saw that Andersen had 1000 engineers, so I was kind of concerned that I wouldn't get that level of attention comparing to their large clients. However, they were very involved into understanding the project and users. The gave the best technology and development advice that I could ever expect from the development partner.

Are there any areas for improvement?

Everything was great.

Please describe your company and your position there.

Andrey Vikulin, head of custom software development department. I work at GMCS Verex Ltd., which operates as general contractor for this project. 

For what projects/services did your company hire Andersen?

We were needing for qualified resources on front-end development (Angular 6.x) at that time. Andren have provided it for our project with needed competences (Angular 6.x/TypeScript, rxJS, DevExtreme, HTML5/CSS) and needed amount of man-hours.

What were your goals for this project?

Creating the universal web-portal for managing the production activities, such as:

• working with plans and gathering the actual information on capital construction projects, as well as projects of technical renovation and maintenance on the oil-refinery objects.
• managing and monitoring of the business-distributed workflow among the customer, investor, project institute, general contractor, 2-nd order contractors and their sub-contractors.
• automation of the management reporting for customers and investors, as well as for TOP-management of the company.

How did you select this vendor?

We have previous success stories with Andersen on other mutual projects.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

Out-staffing the developers with needed qualification:

• Angular 6.x/TypeScript, rxJS, DevExtreme, HTML5/CSS
• Experience in working in Agile/Kanban paradigm
• Experience in gitflow release process model
• Experience in MS TeamFoundation
• Server build and realease processes

What was the team composition?

Andersen was on of our 3 out-staff sub-contractors and was responsible for sourcing the project with Frond-End development resources and expertise.

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

The project contains the unique functionality: combining the end-user portal, the e-documents for construction-specific operations, the management accounting transactions, the customizable work-flow and the storage for tons of electronic documents. The project was completed on time with all the extra-features, required by the business-customer. The system is ready for simultaneous access ~1000 users from 12 regional locations.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

Project management was on the party of GMCS. We use Team Foundation Server to manage the development process and Skype for team communications between Moscow, Minsk, Ulyanovsk and Salavat. Andersen provides a project with development resources.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Their team has the best expertise in Angular I've ever seen. Ability to share expertise with other team members. Readiness for overtime during the pre-release periods.

Are there any areas for improvement?

To be at Moscow

Please describe your company and your position there.

We are developing a platform for carrying out motivation and loyalty programs for our customers. The platform provides functionality for planning, organizing, conducting and monitoring the implementation of such programs, as well as customizing for each individual client. I occupy the position of a leading specialist in the development department.

For what projects/services did your company hire Andersen?

Andersen’s task was to finalize the terms of reference for the implementation of the platform, directly develop according to the terms of reference, taking into account the changes we made, test and stabilize. Since 2018, Andersen developers are involved in the form of a support, make ongoing changes, customize for new customers and eliminate detected bugs.

What were your goals for this project?

Quick start of the project, flexibility in setting up functionality, supportability, following good practices in writing code, scalability. It was also critically important for us that Andersen deliver all the required functionality within the time frames indicated by us.

How did you select this vendor?

Andersen's representative contacted our management through LinkedIn, and we have been communicating periodically since then. Before starting the project, we collected proposals from potential vendors, and Andersen offered the best price / quality ratio, and also committed ourselves to deadlines.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

Andersen’s team developed a technical solution for the platform, we agreed on the project methodology used (SCRUM, two-week sprints), reporting, and communication.

After that, development began. The back-end part of the application (php, Symfoni, Bitrix) and the front-end part (html, css, jquery) were implemented. Implemented application integration with payment and accounting systems.

What was the team composition?

From the very beginning, a business analyst participated in the approval process and then in the current process. The development was carried out by a team of two back-end developers and two full-stack developers. Two manual testers also worked.

Andersen also highlighted project manager (PM) with a technical background, which was actively involved in the development process and carried out constant communication with us.

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

The application was made quickly enough, which allowed us to attract a wide range of customers who were waiting for the application to launch and expand our cooperation. Integration with the accounting system provided us with control over the movement of goods that we sold through the developed platform.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

The Andersen PM allocated from the side was technically educated, which allowed us to quickly coordinate technical solutions, as well as to keep us up to date with everything that happens during the development process.

The team was also motivated, and we are pleased with the level of formulation of the processes and skills of the PM allocated for this project. The PM quickly escalated emerging problems to bring about a quick resolution.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Competitive rates, speed of response to questions, level of developers and domain expertise in our area. Plus the fast speed of submitting the candidates we requested.

Are there any areas for improvement?

Everything is fine at the moment.

Please describe your company and your position there.

We are a B2B SaaS company operating in translation management field providing customers with an automated translatiob management software.

For what projects/services did your company hire Andersen?

One of the services we offer our customers is a command-line tool (CLI tool) that enables easy access to our API. The objective of Andersen was to develop a new version of the CLI tool from scatch.

What were your goals for this project?

The new developed CLI tool had to support all endpoints of our API. It had to be implemented using Golang and be inline with the modern CLI tool command syntax.

How did you select this vendor?

We chose Andersen over several competing companies. They have approached us at Linkedin initially.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

They have developed a Golang SDK that can be used in any Golang project (by developers requiring to integrate Lokalise with their own software). Once the SDK was completed, Anderesen have develolped a CLI tool, which is based on the SDK.

What was the team composition?

There were three people we were interacting with – sales rep, project manager and the developer.

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

The work has been delivered on time according to the specification we have agreed on before. Our customers got the CLI tool and SDK right on time. The time component was essential in our case, as the new CLI tool release is strictly tied to our product roadmap.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

The communication was great, most of which was in Slack besides a few initial intro calls. There was a task list implemented in the time tracking tool and Github issues page.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

The task was very specific. They understood exactly what we needed and the result has met our expectations in full.

Are there any areas for improvement?

Some minor issues were found in the delivered product, however those were corrected very fast and in a very professional level.