Build solutions around your company’s business processes - not the other way round!

Last year we had the chance to take over a project from a previous vendor - the client came to us together with it.

A troubled relationship with the previous vendor

Cooperation between the client and the company building their sales platform was going “not too well”:

• 👉 the client waited weeks, sometimes months, for reported bugs to be fixed and new features to be delivered
• 👉 the vendor’s invoicing was hard to understand - hours of work kept being added without any explanation
• 👉 the solutions released to production were not tested in any way - you could say the system’s users were the testers 😲

But what really was the last straw was a different incident…

A faulty quote calculator

The client asked the vendor to build a calculator for their service, which generated a quote for the system’s user. The user only had to accept the quote, which could then be processed further according to a previously agreed process.

However, when the first quotes were generated in production, it turned out that something was wrong with them…

It turned out that the developers had implemented the calculator so that it worked correctly only for certain parameters hard-coded into it. As soon as a user chose parameters other than the predefined ones, the quote was calculated incorrectly - lowering its value by several hundred zlotys compared with the correct figures! 😱

When the client reported the bug, the vendor said they had no idea how to build the calculator so that it reflected the actual way the formulas were calculated 😱😱

The consequences for the client’s business

As a result, the client had to create a workaround and rebuild the process within their own company so that it accounted for the reduced profit on quotes and the new way of calculating their parameters 😱😱😱

Fortunately, shortly after we started working with the client we solved the problem and everything now works as it should. But the client’s losses, counted in thousands of zlotys (the faulty calculator had been live for about 2-3 months), were gone for good 🙁

What is the moral of the story?

• 👉 it is worth taking the time to vet a potential business or technology partner to avoid problems like this

• 👉 before you start building something, find out how it works and don’t try to change it by force

• 👉 act in line with reality and the business processes - if they need to be adapted to the system you are building, do it only in agreement with the business. At the end of the day, you are changing the way your client’s company works

Have a good day! ☕