Future Processing

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the chief product officer at GlobalGiving, a nonprofit that runs a crowdsourcing platform to connect other nonprofits in 170 countries around the world.

What challenge were you trying to address with Future Processing?

We hired Future Processing to support a joint software development partnership project between ourselves and three other nonprofits. We needed a trusted partner to assist us in adding additional capacity above and beyond normal daily operations.  

What was the scope of their involvement?

Future Processing developed a unique identifier system for nonprofit database coordination among our core organizations. They suggested and helped refine an architecture approach using AWS and a variety of technologies. They answered all of our technical questions as to how the system would work and ensured that the architecture supported our business workflows.

Since developing the system, they’ve continued to maintain it.  

What is the team composition?

I came onto the project four years ago, so I’m not sure how many team members from Future Processing have been assigned to work on this project over the years. We’ve had at least 2–3 people assigned to us in the maintenance phase, and I believe we may have had a few more during the build phase.

How did you come to work with Future Processing?

One of the nonprofits on the project had worked with Future Processing in the past and suggested them. Our group vetted them along with a few other candidates before ultimately settling on Future Processing.

How much have you invested with them?

Over the full course of the engagement, we’ve spent $300,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

My company started working with Future Processing in early 2013, if not before that, and the partnership is ongoing.

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

We’ve always been impressed by the thoughtfulness and problem solving that they bring to making sure they achieve our business goals. They also the bigger picture in mind; if we ask them to do something, they don’t hesitate to point out potential ripple effects we hadn’t considered might negatively impact our AWS costs or other business functionalities.

They make sure we think through all of the implications. They’re not just a partner who’s going to blindly do whatever we say, regardless of the consequences, and then bill us to fix it later. They are true development partners in that they make sure we’re achieving the goals we set out to achieve.

How did Future Processing perform from a project management standpoint?

They perform very well in this regard. We use the Atlassian suite with Confluence and Jira to communicate about specific needs. We also have dedicated email support channels so that we can send requests and get status updates from them, easily going back and forth. My team can look at project plans and past incidents or work requests through a web portal, which has saved us a lot of time over the years.

What did you find most impressive about them?

We’ve been most impressed by their ability to be a part of our development team and business planning.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, nothing in particular comes to mind.

Any advice for potential customers?

My advice would be generic in the sense that if you’re outsourcing, you need to make sure you’re providing as much context as possible. This will allow Future Processing to understand your business goals and create a solution for what you need, rather than the solution for what you say or think you need.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the head of operations for Styles&Wood, a construction company.

What challenge were you trying to address with Future Processing?

The original brief was to deliver a modular property management system. That was completed in late 2017 and was very successful. Since then, we’ve engaged with them to support us through a number of migrations of our client base.

We had a legacy solution on ASP.NET that was based on pretty old technology. It was a package we had originally purchased and customized. We felt like it was time to change it, and we wanted to move to something that was much more modern in its look and feel.

We wanted to change it from being a one-size-fits-all product to being a more generic, modular system, where clients could pick and choose what they wanted to do. The goal was to create a solution that would provide our clients with a significant amount of configuration capabilities. This way, clients could tailor the solution to their business, despite it being an off-the-shelf SaaS product.

We had an in-house development team that was focused mainly on the legacy system, but we didn’t have access to a modern skills base. We needed a company that could provide modern techniques to give our product a much wider exposure.

What was the scope of their involvement?

They updated our software and designed the UI/UX of the platform. The development work is done using the Microsoft stack, specifically ASP.NET. They also leverage HTML5 and the Kendo forms loader.

We have some very large retail clients in the UK, and they’ve helped us migrate them over onto the new platform. Future Processing is also working with us to continuously enhance the product. We’ve consulted with them for two or three more additional modules, as well as a decision analytics integration.

Future Processing also manages our codebase and our release process, and they provide us with third line support for the product. We have a second line support desk based here in the UK, and they provide development support through their office in Poland.

What is the team composition?

The size of the team varied over the course of the engagement. There’s always been between 12–17 people. We have a dedicated team that includes a team lead, two business analysts, one solution architect, nine developers, and four test analysts.

How did you come to work with Future Processing?

We were looking for a technology partner who was operating in our space and could give us access to modern technologies. Future Processing was recommended by a couple of other contacts within the industry. They have a fairly significant footprint in the UK.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent £2.5 million (approximately $3 million USD).

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in April 2016 and the work is ongoing.

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

We’ve worked with them on a series of projects, and they're very good at hitting timelines and getting results.

How did Future Processing perform from a project management standpoint?

The original project was kicked off using Kanban. Since then, we’ve moved more into a Scrum hybrid that's not pure agile. We do quite a lot of requirement specifications.

They continue to perform incredibly well, especially at managing their own resources. We hold weekly meetings with them to make sure the sprint plan is effective and to keep them focused on our current priorities. We have shared access to Git libraries. They use Jira, and we use Azure DevOps.

These common tools help us manage the progress of the project. We also use Slack frequently. We work together closely and have an excellent working relationship.

What did you find most impressive about them?

The most significant value add that they give us is access to a pretty substantial knowledge base. They have between 800–900 employees who work on a broad portfolio of projects across multiple sectors. There’s a constant supply of fresh talent coming through.

Are there any areas they could improve?

We sometimes struggle to get estimates out at a reasonable time. During the initial engagement, we were developing a completely new product from scratch, and there were no real pressures in terms of client demands. Now we work in an environment that is much more client-led.

Sometimes keeping our focus on the commercial aspect of what we’re trying to do can be a little bit challenging. It’s easy to spend time just thinking about the architecture of the solution. There are times when we need them to be a little quicker. It can be difficult when we’re managing budgets against clients and trying to keep the scope really tight.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

You’ll get the most out of your engagement with them by making sure your team is invested in the project. If you work with them on an agile basis, you’ll need to buy into agile completely.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CTO and co-founder or Smart Valor, a Fintech start-up. It’s a digital assets platform that currently supports crypocurrencies and utility tokens. Our business is shifting towards the trading of security tokens in the stock exchange domain.

What challenge were you trying to address with Future Processing?

We partner with Future Processing extensively for our product development and key account management. They’ve helped us bridge the gap between business and technology. There, we’ve found people who can handle the development and technical aspects of blockchain while still engaging in the business side of it.

What was the scope of their involvement?

They’ve developed the software for our product offering. At this point, we operate almost like a hybrid company as they’re engaged in almost all of our technological processes. Their UI/UX member implements wireframes, and my own team aligns our inputs with these before progressing into the development sprint.  

In our collaboration, we’ve utilized multiple versions of AngularJS as well as Nodejs. The backend is primarily operated through Java. When it comes to DevOps, we host our platform on AWS.

On top of working with their senior developers and technical experts, their quality engineers execute the automation and manual testing of the product. Future Processing has even supported us with requirements engineering, which is the process of determining user expectations for a new product.

What is the team composition?

We’ve engaged with a full-scale matrix of a team. We started with technical experts, supported by senior, mid-level, and junior developers. We’ve worked with UI/UX experts as well as quality engineers and senior architects. We also had a Scrum master overlooking the work. Their team range truly speaks volumes about the company’s flexibility.

How did you come to work with Future Processing?

I worked with Future Processing with my former employer before I started my work at Smart Valor.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent over $1,000,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our cooperation began in October 2017, and we have an ongoing relationship that I hope will continue for a very long time. They’re a fixture of our organization.

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

Our success with Future Processing is evident by just how extraordinary our platform currently looks. They’ve been a critical part of developing it.

How did Future Processing perform from a project management standpoint?

We would work within a Scrum framework, and their Scrum master was excellent to work with. Our project management was otherwise executed internally, so they were more focused on the technical delivery aspect. We used Slack, Jira, and Confluence to communicate.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I would especially highlight their expansive technical expertise which has provided us with outstanding security at all levels of our organization.  

Are there any areas they could improve?

I believe that this is something they’re already working on, but we could potentially use more hands in managing our DevOps. They have the knowledge to bridge our system operations with our development but have too few people to leverage that expertise.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the IT manager at a human rights organization.

What challenge were you trying to address with Future Processing?

We needed someone to support and develop our client database system.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Future Processing provides ongoing support of our system. Their developers resolve the issues and work on change requests that we submit as tickets. We’ve also engaged them in a couple of projects to develop the system further.

What is the team composition?

I’ve worked with a number of developers at Future Processing.  

How did you come to work with Future Processing?

My predecessor chose them. One of the main reasons we decided to hire them was because they were the most cost-effective option, which is important for us as a charity.

How much have you invested with them?

On average, we spend about £25,000 (approximately $30,350 USD) each year. We have a support contract, and they bill us by the number of hours we engage them and the amount of change requests we submit.

What is the status of this engagement?

My company began working with Future Processing in July 2017, and the engagement is ongoing.

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

The quality of their work is fantastic, and the level of customer service that they provide is also great.

How did Future Processing perform from a project management standpoint?

They’ve done very fine. We use a ticket system to submit system problems or change requests.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Our experience working with Future Processing has been very positive.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They’re based in Poland, and we’ve experienced a language barrier with 1–2 developers who aren’t great at communicating in English. However, this isn’t a major problem.

Any advice for potential customers?

They're great. If you can find work that is suitable for them, then I’d certainly recommend Future Processing.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the national development manager for FareShare, a food and logistics charity. We redistribute surplus food to charities and community groups across the UK.

What challenge were you trying to address with Future Processing?

My organization needed a bespoke stock control and logistics platform. Unlike other logistics and retail companies, we often don’t know what inventory we’re going to receive in advance, so we needed the platform to be flexible. Also, we needed a modular system so that we could train volunteers of varying IT skill levels on different modules, without having to provide training on the entire system. Finally, we wanted the platform to store information on our beneficiary organizations and provide impact reporting.

What was the scope of their involvement?

My organization provided Future Processing with a storyboard that laid out what we needed the platform to accomplish and what functions we wanted to include. Future Processing’s UX team visited from Poland and spoke with our volunteers and warehouse staff so that they could design the most user-friendly frontend. Then, they designed and developed a custom, web-based, modular platform hosted on AWS. The platform is essentially a database. Future Processing built 7–8 different modules, one of which is a goods-in module that logs stock as it comes into our warehouses. They also created an inventory management module that allows us to check stock or change product type.  

What is the team composition?

We worked with Future Processing’s main development team, which consisted of around six team members. My team interfaced with a project lead and the UI team lead.  

How did you come to work with Future Processing?

We considered an external consultant and several software houses. After narrowing our selection down to three vendors, we chose Future Processing based on their ability to meet our price, design, and support needs.

What is the status of this engagement?

The project spanned December 2015–April 2017, when the platform went live.

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

The platform that Future Processing developed has revolutionized what we do across many aspects. The platform is web-based but also works on mobile, which is very useful because it enables warehouses to use tablets and thereby reduce paper usage. Because we’ve been able to train more of our volunteers to use this user-friendly, intuitive, and clean platform, our processing speeds have significantly increased. Additionally, the goods-in module increased the rate at which we log goods into warehouses by 40%.

We’ve streamlined all of our processes, including inventory management, food allocation, and report and data generation. Having such detailed reporting allows us to serve our users better; for instance, knowing the impact that one of our organizations has allows us to know how much food to send them.

How did Future Processing perform from a project management standpoint?

We were initially worried that the language barrier would impact communication, but their English language skills were second-to-none. Our teams worked well together. Future Processing provided quick response times and visibility into what they were doing, and they resolved issues quickly.

Their team was also very receptive to feedback. When they built the goods-in module, they taught us how to use it and had us test it with our users. Then, they implemented any feedback we provided, tailoring the platform to our user base. The project was on time and budget.  

What did you find most impressive about them?

Future Processing cared about what we did as a company, which is why they sent a team from Poland to spend a few days in our warehouses. This allowed them to understand our processes and see the nuances of our work. It’s rare for coders to visit a company to investigate the core business, and we certainly didn’t expect this level of interaction. They were committed to delivering a system that met our needs in terms of increasing capacity, usability, and processing times. The attention they paid us as a client was impressive. They not only met every deadline but also exceeded our expectations in terms of the quality of the platform.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, I can’t think of any. We’re still very pleased with their work, and we continue to interact with them a lot.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the senior director and portfolio manager for a nonprofit social enterprise. We work with charities to bring them resources like technology, money, and discounters. We help them build the networks that enable nonprofits to make their impact.

What challenge were you trying to address with Future Processing?

We needed a partner to build out our platforms that we use in the U.S. to make them more compatible with our partners around the globe. At the time, we didn’t have the internal technology or capability to accomplish such a goal.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Future Processing mainly works on our online tools, connecting to data stores on the backend that enable us to foster the connections that our nonprofit partners can make. For example, the platform provides nonprofits with electronic tokens, which our donor organizations accept as validation to provide them with donations or discounted offers. Typically, we develop the headline architecture and vision of a project, and then they built it. They use a variety of different tech stacks, depending on the project. They’ve also worked on large-scale directories that list all the nonprofits in a country in order to drive registration and make them more transparent and visible to the public and other countries who want to get involved.

What is the team composition?

I interact with a lead developer, who has a team of eight people.

How did you come to work with Future Processing?

A partner referred them.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our partnership with them has been going since 2009.

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

They filled certain capacity gaps while we built our internal team, complementing our weak spots.

How did Future Processing perform from a project management standpoint?

They meet our needs and are flexible with the kinds of tasks they’re willing to work on. They have good, clear communication.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They’re dedicated and honest, caring about our success and always offering fair prices. They do their best to work around communication concerns that arise from being in a different time zone.

Are there any areas they could improve?

If they want to build long-standing, trusting relationships, then they should start to offer more fixed-price services. For example, they’ve begun to build up their service team.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

Have a clear scope, outline your needs upfront, and maintain reliable and frequent communication.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the director of development for a software provider in the workforce management space. A medium-sized company in a larger group, we are based in the UK and have international clients.

What challenge were you trying to address with Future Processing?

Future Processing is our primary development partner. They augment our internal development team for multiple projects.

What was the scope of their involvement?

The team is building out our platform’s functional capability and technical architecture. Services for the full-stack development include testing, architectural design, and implementations. Predominantly, they are building on top of existing code for this piece of software; our team had the core functionality and original architecture in place at the start of the project.

What is the team composition?

The team comprises about 20 people including an account manager and team lead. The former handles the business side while the latter runs the day-to-day operations. There are also sub-team leads, lead developers, and then developers and QA specialists within each team.

How much have you invested with them?

We currently spend approximately £700,000 ($929,642 USD) per year.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Future Processing 6–7 years ago, but this project began in 2016. The partnership is ongoing.

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

Future Processing implements changes quickly and delivers quality work. The code is well architected and structured. Internal stakeholders find the functionalities user-friendly. We track progress via the user stories and backlogs.

How did Future Processing perform from a project management standpoint?

The team works in scrum. We use the Visual Studio Team Foundation Server. The product owner manages the backlog and the team executes on each item that’s tracked in the repository.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Future Processing is as effective as I would expect an internal team to be. Previous outsourcers have only acted on our functional specifications and design documentation. But with Future Processing, we experience an engaged partnership. This relationship enables us to express our vision and objectives while the team collaborates on design.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, the staff is proactive and responsible. However, Future Processing does allow their staff to move from one project to another. That setup makes it harder to keep workers sustained on less interesting projects, such as those with technical data or legacy technologies. They may not be the best outsourcing solution for grunt work.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

The team is cutting-edge in their space and takes ownership of their work. I highly recommend hiring them because they ensure proper partnerships.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CTO at Demica. We provide a fintech SaaS platform used by major banks to provide working capital to businesses.

What challenge were you trying to address with Future Processing?

We engaged Future Processing to replatform our SaaS platform–written in Visual Basic 6 (VB6)–using newer technologies.

What was the scope of their involvement?

The project was unusual because we didn’t want a like-for-life solution. Future Processing designed and architected the software from its UX experience to its structure and codebase. The team built the system using agile practices. They also worked closely with me to determine the technical architecture and how it needed to interact with existing services.

The SaaS platform now uses microservices. Future Processing wrote the code in Java with an AngularJS user interface.

What is the team composition?

We first worked with a small team comprising a project manager and four designers. As the project progress, Future Processing assigned us a business analyst, a technical architect, and four people devoted to QA. The team has now grown to 45 people.

How did you come to work with Future Processing?

We were searching for a Java development partner. Onshore vendors fell outside our budget, so we looked into two nearshore firms in Poland. They each came back with proposals, and Future Processing offered the best plan.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent $1 million–$5 million so far.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in July 2018, and the partnership is ongoing.

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

We’ve started using the updated platform and demonstrating it to large, multinational banks in Europe. It’s received very positive feedback so far. Future Processing gave us the scalability we were looking for. We’ve engaged their team as a long-term development partner going forward. They developed a rearchitected system rapidly and supplemented our internal team with specialist skills.

How did Future Processing perform from a project management standpoint?

We’re highly satisfied with their communication, documentation, and overall responsiveness. We visit them every six weeks for workshops. Our in-house project manager interfaces with their project manager regularly, and I have weekly calls with their business analyst. We collaborate via Slack and Jira.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Future Processing offers an in-depth knowledge pool that has been invaluable to us. They supplement our team’s development project and specializations.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Nothing comes to mind. We’re highly satisfied with their work.

Any advice for potential customers?

We’ve found it helpful to have a proxy project owner on both our team and theirs. I serve as project owner on my side and interact directly with someone who acts a subject matter expert on the Future Processing team. This process streamlines our communication.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I'm the product director for a medical consultancy and software firm.

What challenge were you trying to address with Future Processing?

We’re a young company and wanted to mature some of our platforms and products by moving them to software form. We wanted to develop a web application from a commercial product that supports business planning for healthcare services.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Future Processing built our web application from scratch. It was full Microsoft stack development using SQL Server and Azure for databases and storage. It has AngularJS on the frontend. They built a web API using Cervalis. We discussed the best technologies to use and decided together.

What is the team composition?

It varies across the project but we generally work with eight people including two QAs, four senior developers, and a team leader.

How did you come to work with Future Processing?

We looked at a range of companies that could meet our software requirements. We searched online and via Clutch, and received some word-of-mouth referrals. Based on our criteria—including cost, aptitude, technology use, and people—Future Processing came out on top.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in March 2017 and it’s ongoing.

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

had a positive impact on the company in terms of our outlook. They’ve given us a platform to build on. They work in a way that ensures anyone can potentially pick up the project at any time; the product is completely independent and they don’t lock you into their firm. That means we have a full-fledged platform that we can build on as a firm. We’re also starting to mature other products.

How did Future Processing perform from a project management standpoint?

They offer an option to run the team for your independently but we chose a model that has me run the team. We use Jira and they’re top-notch with communication and responsiveness as well as documentation. It's been a very positive experience overall. In the first stage of the project to get to MVP, they successfully finished on time, to budget and with the required feature set complete. That’s quite unique.

What did you find most impressive about them?

The first thing that stands out to me is the quality of the individuals in the team. They’re some of the most knowledgeable developers I've ever worked with. They have the aptitude to ensure the project’s success. They care about the success of the product but also of the company. They feel integrated into our team and have a stake in it. They have a genuine interest in building something that will meet our goals.

There’s also a personal element. It’s not with some other firms where you have no idea who’s developing your software and hardly ever see them. I know each and every member of the team very well. That’s the biggest thing for me.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They’ve asked me this themselves and I don’t have much to say on it. It took us a lot of work to get the contract in place so that could be one thing they might improve.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Don’t go to them with a packaged product. Instead, use their BA and UI teams, which are very strong. They’ll be able to help you identify your actual requirements, which might be different from what you think.

Please describe your organization.

We work in business development. We help companies find service providers like Future Processing, for example.

What is your position?

I am the founder of the company. In most cases, I'm also the project manager from the client's side while also managing the business development side of the project.

What business challenge were you trying to address with Future Processing?

One of the first projects we did with them was a custom software project. A company wanted to develop new business-to-consumer software.

We looked around for a company of a certain size. Our experience is that the bigger the company, the better it usually is at internal training of the staff, and holding boot camps. Future Processing confirmed to us that this was something they did a lot, actually. I have seen few companies be that active in internal boot camping. They really keep their staff well trained. Also, we wanted somebody who had a very clear image of project methodology, and how to manage an IT [information technology] project, and how to set roles and expectations. Mainly for those reasons, we chose Future Processing at that time.

Please describe the scope of their involvement in detail.

Future Processing was in charge of deciding which platform and technology we would use for the project and they decided on a PHP-based solution. This was something that scared the more conservative individuals among us because we thought PHP was a hobby thing that you would do in your room, and that you needed Java or .NET to think bigger or create more sustainable structures. Future Processing did a very good job convincing us that PHP had grown since we last updated ourselves.

We have expanded the scope of their involvement to include several mobile projects. They developed both a mobile front-end and then a dynamic back-end. They've used several technologies in the back-end. We've also done a couple e-commerce projects. The mobile projects were for iOS, Android, and mobile Web.

For the very first project, we brought our own designer. What we saw was that when Future Processing started doing testing with their internal UX [user experience] team, we got very good input. The UX/UI [user interface] bit has really impressed me, more than I thought it would from the beginning.

How did you come to work with Future Processing?

Our researcher came up with a list of potential development companies. We knew we wanted to go east to save money. I have done a tremendous amount of outsourcing projects, so I knew back then that the cultural aspect is vital for project success. For this reason, Poland, with its mix of informal flexibility and also the German work ethic and precision, appealed to me. Based on that, they came up with a shortlist of Polish partners. From that shortlist, Future Processing stood out in every way, in terms of their size as well as other things.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

I would estimate it to be a €1.5 million [approximately $1.6 million] investment so far, and growing.

What is the status of this engagement?

The relationship is very much ongoing.

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

The biggest project we've done there reached about 2,200 story points [Scrum methodology for establishing milestones], and it's still going on. That is during about 18 months of development, with a five-person team. I can't fish out an accurate number of projects we've done with them at the moment. Each and every project has been a success, though.

How did Future Processing perform from a project management standpoint?

We were assigned a project manager in addition to several developers. The team project manager is responsible for documentation. Sometimes we will bring in a QA [quality assurance] specialist or somebody from business analysis if they have a backlog because we find that they handle that way better than us or the client. Their QA department and methodology is one of the best I've seen. QAs can be a pain in the back sometimes, but they have really brought our projects forward.

What distinguishes Future Processing from other providers?

They're really proud of the strength and talent of their QA. I think that what makes Future Processing unique is how they're doing internal QA conferences, and how they keep honing their model of how to integrate more effective QA into their core development team.

In hindsight, are there areas in which they could improve, or things you might do differently?

I felt that they did not have a good model for price estimations. It's difficult to estimate a project that is supposed to be agile, but we saw that, sometimes, they would use a team for estimating the project and then the project would be sent to another team. This caused a lot of frustration, because the estimates were way off. Sometimes, it would say 56 man-days, and it turned out to be more than 100. They are getting better now. One of their ways of solving the problem is to force the customer to do a pre-project.