Huenei IT Services

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the IT manager at a portfolio investment company based in Argentina.

What challenge were you trying to address with Huenei IT Services?

We engaged with Huenei IT Services for development work.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Huenei IT Services built our company an app for iOS and Android.

What is the team composition?

I met with a few people including a project manager, three developers, and a QA tester. I’m not sure if they had a bigger internal team working on the app.

How did you come to work with Huenei IT Services?

I had talked with them before this project came about. I found their profile interesting and heard great things. When we started the project, we made a list of potential suppliers and chose Huenei IT Services. We were impressed by their references and price.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Huenei IT Services in June 2017. The work continued until a few months ago.

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

As with every project, adjustments need to be made, but their team did an excellent job. Huenei IT Services created a successful application for my company. They were honest and worked to make proposed improvements when needed.

How did Huenei IT Services perform from a project management standpoint?

Their team was exceptional at communication. If there were any issues, we could talk to them, and they were open to hearing our feedback. Jira was our main project management tool.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their biggest strength is their communication.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I can’t think of anything at the moment.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am a development manager for an insurance company.

What challenge were you trying to address with Huenei IT Services?

 They provide us with outsourcing services. They find and manage developers for us, most of them work home office. We lead .Net development projects with coordinated teams.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Development projects have included .NET, C#, Model View, and SQL databases.

What is the team composition?

The team has scaled from two to eight developers.

How did you come to work with Huenei IT Services?

The team reached out to us with a proposal for serving as our supplier. However, we wanted to diversify and eventually formed the current development-based partnership.

 What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them in 2017 and the partnership is ongoing.

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

We are very happy with their work. They are very efficient, retain excellent resources, and have ideal HR policies.

How did Huenei IT Services perform from a project management standpoint?

Our team does project management. However, communication with Huenei IT Services is great.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their communication skills and HR policies stand out.

Are there any areas they could improve?

We are very pleased with their work.

Please describe your organization.

Our company is a major retailer in Latin America. We operate out of several South American countries. We have several areas, including department stores and home improvement. We have supermarket shopping centers, and finance divisions that have banking. The area that worked with Huenei was the department store division.

What is your position?

I'm the CIO [chief information officer] of the department stores division.

What business challenge were you trying to address with Huenei IT Services?

We were looking to build our first app for our customers. It was an app intended for the smartphones of our customers. We wanted a store locator, a product catalog, news about operating hours or if there's a holiday. We also wanted contact information and a checkout process. We wanted customers to be able to add from the catalog that is in the app to the cart. The cart is the mobilized version of the web. The app interacts with the cart and puts in the cart all the things that I'm selecting while I'm browsing the app. That was the first goal. We wanted an app with those features at least.

Please describe the scope of their involvement in detail.

We had very clear goals. We contacted a company for the user experience. They worked with the users making all the mocks of the screens and how to navigate and the difference between iOS and Android and different devices. We ended up with all the user experience that you need to navigate the app. These are back office systems – the Legacy systems and for this screen we think that the information we have there we need to get there. 

How did you come to work with Huenei IT Services?

Our home improvement division was the most advanced as far as apps go. We tend to look at them as an internal provider. We compared what that division knows with three providers. One of them was Huenei. Because of price and because of experience we thought it was a good provider to start with. We went ahead with them.

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

I can't give you that information. I can say we wanted to do the first and second step for a certain budget, and we only got to the first step with that budget. There are many reasons behind that. First is inexperience from our side in working with apps. 

What is the status of this project?

We started in April 2014. The first phase was completed in February 2015. You can download it. It's on the App Store. We're still working with Huenei for the next steps.

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

We haven't launched the app with marketing yet. We just published it and it's out there. But, we never did a campaign. There are people downloading the app and using it. We have a very high rate of usage. We didn't know that it was going to be used so frequently. It was a surprise for us. The end product is very good. I like it. There were two things to improve. One was the speed. Sometimes, when you're working with 3G, because of the architecture, it's a little bit slow. We had two or three issues around the app, but it wasn't Huenei's fault. It wasn't something we needed to record or republish. It was more in the middle layer. It was because of this lack of knowledge of how to deploy the architecture. If we go back in time, that regret is the only thing that's still hurting us today. In the other areas – usage and how it looks, how it behaves, and some comments of the people that use it – we are OK.

What distinguishes Huenei IT Services from other providers?

Huenei IT Services is easy to reach. Sometimes, when you work with developing companies, you only have contact with the programmers. In this case, they have some senior people and also the director of the company [Jorge Attaguile] and the CEO [Gustavo Commisso]. I can call them, they will answer, and they will take care of things. That's a very good thing. You are speaking with business people. They will listen to you and take care of the things that you are proposing. They were flexible with us. 

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

In the beginning, they didn't offer guidance as much. But, as time went on, they started to help. In the beginning, if you're going to get an expert in something and you say "these are the sketches I have," you're expecting the transference of knowledge from the provider to you. For instance, "You're going to use APIs [application programming interfaces] but, for what you are going to solve, that's not the best architecture. We can say that this will work better."

In the beginning, we had trial and error, and we learned inside the integration layer how to integrate and how to get the information available for the app and stuff. So, in that process, there was a lot of reworking to be done, and then we had to redefine the contract because that resulted in changing code for the app or changing some services. That's the main issue that I had with them. Otherwise, they're an excellent company. They have people that know how to do things and how to program in the different platforms. They're a good company. They should put more effort in at the beginning to transfer some of the knowledge and to redefine some things. Their approach was, you tell me what you need, and I will build it. We were thinking more of, "Go this way for what you want as far as user experience and the kind of information you want to put in the app. I will suggest you go this way." That didn't happen. 

The budgeting issue I mentioned earlier wasn't all on Huenei. We thought it was OK, but when we started working, and we needed to do all the redefinitions and rework, we ended up having half of what we planned for the budget. It was more of a methodology problem. We're developing the second phase, and we changed the methodology, and they were OK with that. We are now going into an Agile way of working. They reshaped their team to work with us.

Could you please describe your company and the role that you play there?

American International Group, Inc. [AIG] is a leading global insurance company. Presently, I am the vice president of Infrastructure for the Latin American and Caribbean regions. Formerly, I was the IT [information technology] manager for Argentina and Uruguay.

What was the business challenge were you trying to address with Huenei IT Services?  

We contacted Huenei to help augment our own internal team of developers. In total, we've hired more than 20 developers from them to help develop custom software solutions as well as deal with testing, configuration, and integration projects.

Can you discuss the scope of the project?

We hired Huenei to help us automate one of our call center areas. It was an integrated project that required a thorough evaluation of the systems we have in place and our internal processes, documentation, and practices. It was a large-scale project, and we didn't have enough of our own developers to handle the project scope within the required timeframe. Huenei was able to bring in a number of talented engineers, architects, and other specialists to support the completion of the project. 

How did you come to work with Huenei IT Services?

The AIG procurement division selected them after going through an RFP [request for proposal] process. To be honest, Huenei receives a lot of great recognition from people in my market.

Can you provide a sense of the size of this engagement?   

The project spanned eight months with four full-time developers working on the solution.

When was the project completed?

We finished the project around the third quarter of 2013.

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this project?

I can't disclose any specific metrics or benchmarks from the project. Those figures are confidential and vital to our competitive advantage. I can tell you that our own internal management team was very impressed with how easily we were able to incorporate Huenei's developers into our own team. The quality of their work was right up there with our own, and it only took a few weeks to get into an efficient workflow. 

Is there anything that you would consider unique about their practice?  

Huenei IT Services showed us that they have exceptional project control and management skills. We assigned them a project manager, and they were always on top of things, giving us weekly status reports on their completed milestones. 

Please describe your organization.

NEC Corp is a Japanese company with presence around the world. NEC Argentina provides biometrics, security, and e-government solutions, and we are one of the five software centers of NEC around the world.

What is your position?

I'm a software development manager.

What business challenge were you trying to address with Huenei IT Solutions?

Our challenge was to develop an application for Border Control System for LATAM and Huenei helped us in the analysis and development of some modules and interfaces, including the interfaces between the product and the biometric devices as fingerprint and passport scanners. We needed additional technical resources to support the development of these custom modules and interfaces as well as with the configuration. They've been developing mostly with .NET.

Please describe the scope of their involvement in detail.

This remains an ongoing project, so the scale and scope of their involvement are subject to change. I can tell you that the majority of their work is custom development, architecture, and testing. We work in tandem as we implement our new systems. So far, the project has required more than 12,000 hours of development, testing, and documentation. It's an extremely complex undertaking. 

How did you come to choose Huenei IT Solutions?

We released an RFP [request for proposal] to several different vendors outlining our project requirements. The actual selection process took into consideration the cost, their technical experience, and comprehensive interviews with experts from each vendor. Based on that process, we decided that Huenei IT Solutions was the best fit.

This project remains ongoing, correct?

Yes.

Is there an estimated completion date set?

We expect to finish this project in September [2015].

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

It's difficult to quantify the quality of their work because this is a collaborative effort. We use their resources to increase our own internal capacity and ensure that the solutions we're developing are stable and efficient. Internally, our technical leads and project managers are pleased with their consistent quality and the overall workflow that we have with Huenei. 

Is there anything that you'd consider unique about their practice?

The most important added value from Huenei for us was their flexibility. They are also absolutely results-oriented, and they always place customer satisfaction ahead of revenue, which is something you don't see often with technology vendors.

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

Not at all. We've been thoroughly impressed. It's a great working relationship.