Neoteric

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the President of Applied Storytelling, Inc.

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Brand marketing and communications strategy for companies, products and brands.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Neoteric to accomplish?

• Develop a market-ready proof of concept for an AI-enabled voice management tool
• Provide key insights for a development roadmap for the new tool.
• Support our go-to-market motion with ongoing technical support

SOLUTION

How did you find Neoteric?

• Online Search
• Referral

Why did you select Neoteric over others?

• High ratings
• Close to my geographic location
• Pricing fit our budget
• Good value for cost

How many teammates from Neoteric were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

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

Develop a market-ready Proof of Concept of a SaaS-based, AI-enabled enterprise marketing software tool geared to scaling and optimizing brand voice management and compliance, as the first stage of a broader, ongoing product development engagement. Key deliverables include a client-friendly user interface paired with an Open AI-supported GPT that ingests voice guideline data. 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

On-time delivery of the product that looked and performed according to spec

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

All deliverables were provided on time. On the one occasion when Neoteric needed to modify the timetable slightly they notified us well in advance and provided alternate staffing to maintain project progress. They responded clearly and creatively to our needs, both in person and in writing. 

What was your primary form of communication with Neoteric?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

Extremely buttoned up at every stage, with good written and verbal communications. 

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

No. They proved themselves very competent and pleasant to work with. We plan to continue working with them both on this and future offerings.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the founder of flumiq Ltd

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

flumiq provides tools to analyze logistics, esp. warehousing processes in a new and innovative way, enables data driven management decisions and fosters the collaboration between the various involved specialists.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Neoteric to accomplish?

• development of specific visualization widgets for warehousing / logistics

SOLUTION

How did you find Neoteric?

Referral

Why did you select Neoteric over others?

• Pricing fit our budget
• Great culture fit
• Good value for cost
• Referred to me

How many teammates from Neoteric were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

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

Four very specific visualization widgets for process analysis in the warehousing and logistics space should be developed based on the yFiles framework provided by yWorks, showing the execution of an order on the shop floor and in the time line, enabling process mining and data driven documentation. All widgets should have a modern look and feel and be intuitive in its rich interactions.The widgets should run standalone, but can also be embedded into low-code frameworks.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

All requirements were fulfilled and even exceeded. Even so I had due to earlier prototyping a clear picture in mind, how the result should look like, based on the discussions we have extended the features without increasing the efforts significantly (low hanging fruits). From the first version each function has not only worked, it was always looking nice. Developers with a good taste for design asking the right questions and delivering results. That's how development feels like fun.

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

The project was set up using Scrum methodology. Unless in other projects, which I have seen, the scrum master was really acting as a coach. The most visible activity was time keeping during the meetings, all the rest was magically floating. As I don't believe in miracles, in reality the given guidance hasn't felt as such.

What was your primary form of communication with Neoteric?

Virtual Meeting

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

The mixture of technical competency, lightweight methodology, good feeling for design, eagerness to go beyond the expectations and a good portion of fun have created an incredible project spirit. The team made the difference.

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

The discussions in the retrospectives have been mostly about hints to the involved team members to reach even more excellence. Finetuning at the highest level.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm Accolade Pro COO and co-founder. I'm in charge of the development of the product

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Neoteric, and what were your goals?

We need to connect our software with one of our partners through API. We hired Neoteric to do that job. The objectives of that connection is to enable more feature for our clients.

SOLUTION

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

We made a selection based on the experience on the field, the profile of the developers and their methodology

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

The project last for 8 weeks. We had 2 weeks to setup and create the first API connection. Then there was 5 weeks to develop all the API related features and 1 week to finalize (fix bugs, tweaks).

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

There were 4:

• 1 Business manager
• 1 Tech lead
• 1 Back-end developer
• 1 scrum master

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

With the API connection, we were able to help our clients on their daily work so it also allows us to grow our customer base.

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

The project management was kept by us. We were using Slack and Miro as project management tools. The team was able to adapt very quickly to our work approach.

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

The team is very responsive and agile. They are also proposing several solutions/approach to solve problems

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

They were very well organise and applied well the scrum methodology. I believe there is still some room of improvements in the problem solving.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CSO of Next Tomorrow, an IT services and tech company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Neoteric?

We hired Neoteric because we were having a hard time finding frontend engineers for our project.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Neoteric helped us find and appoint a great engineer to realize our vision for the software build. They utilize JavaScript in the development process, and also provided us with a web designer to make improvements to the website.

What is the team composition?

We mainly work with around eight people from their team.

How did you come to work with Neoteric?

Neoteric was recommended to me by a mutual contact.

How much have you invested with them?

So far we’ve spent somewhere between $25,000–$50,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our ongoing partnership started in February 2022.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

They provide us with very nice designs as well as fully-functional prototypes of our products that we can pitch to investors, so we’ve been very happy with our partnership with Neoteric.

How did Neoteric perform from a project management standpoint?

The collaboration we have with their team has been great, so they work incredibly well from a project management standpoint.

We initially didn’t have a clear picture of what we wanted to achieve, but they were able to swiftly gather the requirements for us and create a good iteration of our vision.

We typically communicated through Google Meet and Slack.

What did you find most impressive about them?

We’re impressed with their ability to deliver their requirements with agility. Everything has been accomplished faster than expected, which I believe is the highlight of our collaboration.

Are there any areas they could improve?

We’ve experienced some communication breakdowns throughout our partnership but other than that, I don’t have any major complaints.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

I would recommend working with them because they can do a good job of iterating your vision, especially if you don’t have a clear picture of your goals.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

We are small spin-off of a bigger company. I am responsible for business development of the new concept.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Neoteric, and what were your goals?

Our goal involved building a customized software from scratch. That included also application on mobile devices.

SOLUTION

How did you select Neoteric and what were the deciding factors?

We found the company on Clutch. Our first decision to include Neoteric on the short list of potential partners was based on the reviews. Then, we checked the cases and software examples developed by Neoteric to make sure they would be able to quickly grasp our industry specifics. Then, excellent customer service persuaded us that Neoteric is trustworthy.

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

Scope of work included a wide spectrum of services - starting from project planning and workshops at the beginning, through design (UX/UI phase), until the release and moving all parts of the infrastructure to the final destination. We also use maintenance of the system.

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

1 FE developer, 2 BE developers, 1 scrum master, 1 senior developer, 1 UX/UI designer, 1 customer service, 1 PO proxy. Excellent team, performed at the highest level without exceptions.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The team worked so well we decided to set up a maintenance contract with them. The team managed to deliver all goals on time and at top quality.

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

The communication and project management style were very professional. On the daily basis we used JIRA and Slack. The team members responded to posed questions very fast and with enough clarification. I recall summary calls (backlog refinement) being very positive due to delivered results. The team members' engagement in the project was visible from day 1.

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

The engagement of team members in the project was most impressive. Aside from being IT experts, all project members were very helpful, open and managed to explain technical matters to non-IT people in accessible manner. Also, during the cooperation one could sense a good understanding and energized, positive atmosphere among project team members.

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

Design phase could have gone smoother.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the CTO of a mental health tech company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Neoteric, and what were your goals?

Neoteric was tasked with developing the frontend of our MVP as a responsive React webapp according to existing branding and designs.

SOLUTION

How did you select Neoteric and what were the deciding factors?

We have been screening several vendors in the space and Neoteric won the competition thanks to excellent communication and ability to quickly frame our needs.

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

They setup the frontend application from scratch handling everything from repo, CI/CD and automated code quality checks. The key deliverable is a responsive webapp implemented in React, styled according to our branding and designs and integrated with our backend which includes WebRTC components and a third party authentication service.

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

There was 1 Software Engineer allocated full time and 1 Agile Delivery Lead to help with project managing; other resources helped overseeing the project.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Excellent code quality and work ethics. We achieved more than we were hoping to thanks to the technical skills and proactive attitude of the developer who explored and implemented solutions which are a much better fit to our needs than what was presented to him as an explicit requirement from us.

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

Great project management, daily standups with weekly sprints (demo+retro+planning). Main communication channels: Slack for messaging and Jira for issue tracking.

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

Work ethics and proactive attitude.

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

Nothing that I could see.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the software architect. We are a cybersecurity company providing services to SME clients.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Neoteric, and what were your goals?

We needed a new customer portal.

SOLUTION

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

We talked to companies in Poland and Ukraine. Neoteric was from the start professional in their communication and approach and everybody knew what they were talking about.

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

We started with a meeting and a design session in their office in Gdansk. After this the product is developed in sprint using scrum. The main technology used is React.

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

We worked with a UX designed, a software developer, a scrum master and an account manager.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The portal is still in development and have been published internally only, but we already had good feedback. We're about to publish the portal to the first group of customers.

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

Neoteric works according agile practices and scrum specifically with all the rituals like planning and demos. Communication is mostly done using chat applications and planning using an online tools.

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

Neoteric is a company with professional and passionate people focused on finding the best solutions. They take pride in their work.

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

Maybe an improvement would be to do a retrospective with the customer.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Our company provides data-driven solutions to complete today's mission safely and efficiently while preventing issues that may arise tomorrow. With our digital solutions and analytics, we provide everything an airline needs to operate its fleet, regardless of manufacturer, efficiently over the course of that aircraft's lifetime.

My position is a researcher in the innovation portfolio, looking to the market and technology trends to determine the future of digital solutions for the aviation industry.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Neoteric?

We are constantly looking at new technologies to prove (or disprove their feasibility) in the aviation industry. We saw an opportunity with recent advances in automatic speech recognition to be applied in the unique setting of a cockpit: It's noisy, many people may be talking at any one given time, pilots from al around the world are speaking in different accents (albeit usually in English), but the communication language is restricted to a standardized phraseology.

What were your goals for this project?

Determine whether or not state of the art machine learning models were adequate enough to be implemented in a cockpit setting. "Good enough" means high performance, not just for safety but also for acceptability.

Pilots have a lot to do. If the application for which automatic speech recognition was implemented doesn't work nearly all of the time, it will quickly become a garbage function.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

We had experience with them in the past. They could quickly scale up and down the resources we needed, e.g. start with an AI engineer and swap out for an iOS developer when we were ready to build the application. Proximity to the office in Gdansk, Poland.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

We provided the business use case, and limited sets of training data. They built a pipeline to train an automatic speech recognition model, in addition to other open source training data, and once they'd refined the model, built it into a demonstrator application for iOS. They chose how to build the pipeline, train & tune the model, and how to deploy it for mobile.

What was the team composition?

Two AI engineers, a scrum master and an iOS developer. At the beginning of the project, the AI engineers were more online, towards the end, the work shifted towards iOS development.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We saved costs in developing an automatic speech recognition solution before the technology was ready. Rather than building a subpar solution, we tested various hypotheses in the research phase with Neoteric to determine whether or not the technology is worth the investment.

We now know what steps need to be accomplished and what increases in performance we need to hit before we can start talking about production-ready technology.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

Arranged for the most part by us, with a scrum master sending daily reports. The developers/engineers were responsible for breaking down high-level requirements into more manageable user stories and tasks.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Their ability to switch out expertise to match customer needs stood out to us. Their flexibility in both skill and scope to adapt to the ever-changing needs of the customer.

Are there any areas for improvement?

Breaking down difficult themes into understandable chunks for the client. They are the experts. They have more experience and understanding with the technology for which they were hired. Rather than a requirements -> solution, we also hired them in part to learn from their expertise.

Never be afraid to break it down into very simple terms for the client. Try out new things. We don't know if things are going to work either. But trying it out and documenting your failures/successes is just as important as the final product.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am the CTO of a digital advertising platform. Our main customers are in the publishing industry.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Neoteric?

We wanted to try them out, and we just needed to offload some of the work from us to them.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We did two projects with Neoteric. Our first project web development project with them where we needed a certain functionality in the frontend. It was a graphical feature or a special advertisement where a video would be playing, and we developed that with them.

We gave them a dummy as a template and they basically reprogrammed the whole thing so that it would actually work for us. This was a test pilot to see if we could outsource some work to them.

We also did a data exploitation project where we explored some of the data which we collect, and the focus was on understanding our data and maybe deduct AI possibilities or projects from it.

We had a lot of questions around our data which we couldn’t really figure out on our own because we lack certain skillsets, such as statistical or mathematical skillsets. Neoteric helped us set up a base project on where we would be able to start with the whole data topic at our company.

They provided workshops and 2–3 week-long sprints with a physicist who dove into the data and looked for certain relations that might have been there and were trying to verify or falsify a lot of things. He basically tried to verify things we were assuming about our data.

Examining the data, they looked for relations or tried to verify or find out new things about the data. They generated a report and presented the data to us. We could then deduct some information from that.

What is the team composition?

We have worked with three people, and there were two more people that were involved in the meetings.

How did you come to work with Neoteric?

They were recommended to us by a colleague of mine. He was at a roadshow event and told me that we should check them out to see if they could help us with our data project.

How much have you invested in them?

It is around $20,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started with them in January or February 2020 and it’s ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

With the data project, it is quite hard to measure because we are still in the exploration phase. It isn’t a numerical thing, but we basically are building up an idea right now on how this data could work for us, how AI could play a role in the future, and what the road would actually look like. This has been pretty helpful for us because we are always generating ideas and brainstorming about stuff, but we never really had a practical way of approaching this whole thing. With Neoteric, I know that we have a partner there which could actually help us get started with this whole data thing. It was very broad and I am pretty sure they will help us actually lift off with the data stuff.

How did Neoteric perform from a project management standpoint?

From the data project, it was pretty good at the beginning when we did the kickoff. During the project, generally, it was pretty good, but sometimes communication was a little bit slow. Overall, I would give them a B+ or A-. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

In general, their spirit is quite good, and I think the data team has a really interesting structure. I met some of the AI team there in Poland, and they really lived the whole research idea. It is different than working with normal software developers. They really have a scientific approach which is extremely interesting and something I think is really helpful if you are just starting with data. They keep you open-minded, and they have their own culture there which is quite cool.

Are there any areas they could improve?

With these kinds of projects, you always have some starting problems on how to provide the data or providing them with the right data. There was a little bit of a back and forth, and we had a little bit of a delay of two or three weeks until we really could get started. There was a bit of a miscommunication from sales to the start of the project. This could have been smoother, but it was still good in my opinion.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

With the web development stuff, I still think this can be helpful if you need to offload some work from your own organization. It was a very small project and it was quite good that it wasn’t connected to our other stuff in our company because I think it was a little hard to integrate them into all of our processes. If I would recommend something, I would tell anyone to just start with one small project that isn’t related to anything else in the company if that is possible. You can then get an idea of how they work and the quality they generate.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CEO of Business Intelligence Group, a business solutions company that provides AI and consultancy to private healthcare organizations.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Neoteric?

A group of our clients was trying to find solutions for the cancer pathway. It was an AI solution that would allow organizations to plan their capacity in order to better meet demand.

A particular goal of this project is to reduce delays for patients on cancer pathways. It’s quite unique, and the benefits are going to be quite huge, once we’ve developed an MVP that we can deploy to different organizations and once we’ve carried out further development.

The scope was provided by six organizations working together. We partnered with Neoteric to create software using machine learning to analyze data from these organizations over a series of years.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

The initial piece of work with Neoteric was investigating whether our hypothesis was possible. They carried out tests over a series of weeks, and built the algorithm for us, proving that it would work. The next stage was of course to expand that. We went to Poland for two days to ensure that we captured every aspect of what we were trying to deliver. 

After those two days, the project management lead and team were able to collate an accurate document covering exactly what it was we were trying to deliver. Once we approved it, we moved to the product development stage.

Neoteric built the software from scratch using various technologies, including Python and Open Library. We’re using technologies like Qlik and SQL Server to present the data that’s continuously being calculated. 

The team gave us a number of options in terms of the visual output and has also started to use linear regression. There was a lot of statistical modeling required for creating this product.

What is the team composition?

We work with three developers — one senior, one frontend, and one backend — a senior data scientist, and a project manager. We’ve worked very closely with their CTO, their director of business development, and their CEO. 

How did you come to work with Neoteric?

After researching a number of companies that had clear examples of using machine learning to create products, we contacted some Hungarian and Polish companies. Neoteric had the most robust portfolio. 

Once we had a discussion with them, they came up on top of 15–20 other companies we had spoken to. The CTO, CEO, and director of business development were the three key people we initially approached to explain what we were planning to do.

How much have you invested with them?

The initial stage cost just under $10,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Neoteric in December 2019, and our engagement is ongoing. There are different aspects we’re going to be working on with them.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We used accurate data from the last few years, and the goal of the module was to calculate to the best possible accuracy, relative to that real-life data. The accuracy rate was just over 80%. Considering that this was just an initial model, we only had a 19% error rate. 

Neoteric developed quite a strong model, and we’re continuing to strengthen it to make it even more accurate, using data from more years. The prediction of the model was pretty close to the real-life data. 

The software is initially being used by one organization, the pilot organization in the group. It will then be deployed to all organizations at a later stage.  

How did Neoteric perform from a project management standpoint?

The team is very professional. There was a total of four core team members allocated, but their senior members were also very much involved, checking up on where we were at each stage and supporting us with the project. The customer service was outstanding.

They allocated a project manager who, along with the lead developer, supported us in carrying out the initial scoping exercise. They called it an AI sprint. The location difference wasn’t an obstacle because Neoteric used platforms we were comfortable with, including Slack. 

They often called using videoconferencing tools. In addition to the two touch points we had during the week, there was also communication throughout the entire path of the project. There was no communication gap. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

I’m impressed by their experience and understanding of what we’re trying to do, as well as their creative approach to bringing our idea to life. The communication of this team is really second to none. 

It feels like they’re an extension of our team, as opposed to just a company trying to gain profit. They spent a lot of time working on it, going above and beyond, and their hospitality was really great when we went to Poland.

Are there any areas they could improve?

The only thing in terms of room for improvement is the language barrier. We sometimes have to doublecheck what they mean, because they speak English differently. That’s really minimal, though. They speak great English, our interpretations just need to be elaborated on sometimes to make sure we’re on the same page.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

They’re absolutely open to having regular communication. It’s just a matter of going there and understanding how the company works. We went over there and saw how they worked, what their offices looked like, and who their teams were. 

It enhanced the relationship, and it made them feel like the project was truly theirs. It feels like an extended team, as opposed to a third party that’s been asked to do something, which is something we don’t always see.