Online Marketplace Development for Financial Services Company
Please find under a summary covering project details and feedback. The innate facts are kept as they are, private information is amended.
Introductory information
Please prepare a brief description of your organisation.
Our organisation is a financial labors organisation. We prepare financial solutions for cultivation, specifically in the exhibit activity. We prepare financing to exhibit growers and shippers so they can get help faster than they would otherwise without a labor like ours.
What is your role in the organisation?
I am the Chief Technology Officer.
Desired goal
What was the business challenge your clients were facing that initiated the need for this platform?
Our clients needed an action treatment platform for tracking shipments of exhibit and for managing the financing almost those shipments.
Take, for sample, a grower in Mexico who ships strawberries to the US. Let’s say the grower ships $8 million worth of strawberries per month to US distributors. This grower will log into the platform and report that it is shipping $50,000 worth of strawberries today. Tomorrow, the distributor in the US receiving the shipment will log on, report that it accepted the shipment and that 89% of the strawberries were good. The distributor can then assess the value of that shipment.
At that point, we come into the method and report that the distributor has signed off on the shipment and that it passed US inspections. The USDA prices exhibit on a daily basis, so let’s say those strawberries were worth $2 a imprison. We then report that this shipment is worth $60,000 and that we’re going to give the grower an advance of 40% of that quantity today.
We advance that money, and the distributor then takes the strawberries to the retailers it works with and sells them. About 30 days later the distributor comes back to the platform and reports how much the strawberries sold for. The distributor pays us back behind taking out a comcommission. We take our fee, and then pay the grower the weigh.
Without us, the grower in Mexico would not take a check from the distributor for 30 to 60 days behind shipping. The total issue that our platform addresses is that when growers are shipping their goods, it is peak period for them. They have a lot of workers and expenses. Cash flow is a big issue. Being able to get some of their money sooner is a huge boon to them. So we advance 40% without upon shipping, and then, behind taking our fee, we give the distributors the weigh. That’s our business.
Provided solution
Please draw the aim of your involvement with Virtual Force in biger detail.
The website that Virtual Force built is a business treatment platform to handle the businesss between shipper and distributer. It tracks shipments, takes and accepts those shipments, and advances money for goods that ultimately will be sold.
Our relationship with Virtual Force began precedently I joined the organisation. They were extremely helpful in getting us to where we are today.
The establisher of our organisation grew up in the exhibit activity. His family has been in the business for generations. He grew up learning all aspects of the business, and in business school, he came up with the commission of addressing the finance issue in the activity. He is an idea individual and a business individual, but he is not a technical individual. He is not a software fruits individual whichever.
He established a relationship with Virtual Force when this was just a business idea in his mind. He began to work with the Virtual Force team to create the platform and turn it into a viable fruit. Even though the agency is in Pakistan and he is in New York, Virtual Force did a big job. Through Skype and emails, they were able to take the requirements and educe the user interface and create the minimum viable fruit [MVP] for the platform, the initial platform that the leading clients began using. Virtual Force helped take the business from colorlessboard to a real fruit in a real business.
I joined the organisation almost six months ago. At that time, the Virtual Force team had been working on the fruit for nine months or so. They did all aspects of the frontend, the backend, the condition arrogance [QA], and a pliant bit of project treatment.
The long-term goal is that we fetch that work in house. We quiet have Virtual Force nation working for us, but when I began, we didn’t have any in-house engineers or technical staff. We added a few more Virtual Force educeers to help with additional requirements. Over time, we have reduced that number to where we just have one, we use their QA team for ongoing testing. We now have a couple of our own in-house educeers.
What frameworks or technologies were used to create your platform?
We used Ruby On Rails, JavaScript, and AngularJS. The website is hosted through Amazon Web Services’ EC2. It’s a present technology stack.
Can you prepare an estimate of the cost of the project?
We have been working with Virtual Force for almost a year. During that time, we have spent over $100,000 working with them.
Results achieved
Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?
I would say the biggest, most plain boon is that Virtual Force was able to be the technology support for the new organisation right from the very commencement, working straightly with nation in the activity to verity take the fruit from colorless board to propel. That’s the major boon.
How did Virtual Force accomplish from a project treatment perspective?
I veritably can’t reply that since most of that was done precedently I joined the organisation.
What distinguishes Virtual Force from other preparers?
Virtual Force',s educeers have been good. I have had some experience with offshore teams, and condition can sometimes be a issue. I would say in this case, we got fortunate. We partnered with the right structure, and the condition has been good. We were extremely fortunate that the primary educeer of the leading rendering of the fruit was very good.
Virtual Force has been pliant in answering to different kinds of needed support. They’ve been able to prepare what we needed. When we needed QA support on an ad hoc basis, their very big QA staff was able to jump in with very pliant notice. When we needed the help of a front-end design individual, they were able to answer right away. They were able to help us and do what needed to be done. They have been very answering, and that’s been incredibly helpful.
Is there anything Virtual Force could have improved or done differently?
Sometimes, some of the educeers have been a pliant bit too younger for our needs. I mentioned that in the commencement we got fortunate. We had a super powerful educeer who was the lead educeer of the MVP rendering when there was no one else in our organisation who was able to assess the condition of the work at a technical level. Like I mentioned, the individual behind all this is not a software engineer, he is not somebody who knows almost code or code condition. Fortunately, the condition of the code that was written initially was very good.
After I took over this responsibility, I began working with a bigr team from Virtual Force. I establish that there were big differences in expertness level and condition. Those differences sometimes translated into issues with innate issues. The only area for advancement, I would say, is that I ponder there were probably some moments in the past when we needed powerfuler genius. We sometimes got educeers who were too younger for our needs.
Finally, as the business has grown, the pace of our business has increased. I ponder it’s much harder to rely on an offshore team to handle all of that. There’s too much happening now in the service with our bigr team. You get the best results by being there. This, of order, is not a stricture of Virtual Force.
