Last year, we had the opportunity to take over a project from a previous contractor, with whom the Client came to us.
- The cooperation between him and the sales platform provider was going “not so well”:
- the Client waited weeks, sometimes even months, for reported bugs and new features
- the contractor billed in an incomprehensible way, adding work hours without further explanation
- solutions landing in production were not tested in any way – you could say that the system users were the testers
However, the straw that broke the camel’s back was another incident…
The Client asked the contractor to build a calculator for their service, based on which an offer was generated for the system user. Thanks to this, the user approved only the offer that could be processed further in a pre-established process.
However, with the first offers generated in production, it was noticed that something was wrong with them…
It turned out that the programmers implemented the calculator in such a way that it worked correctly for some parameters “hardcoded” in the code. As soon as the user selected parameters other than the predefined ones, the offer was calculated incorrectly, lowering the offer value relative to the correct data by several hundred zlotys!
When the Client reported the error to the contractor, they stated that they had no idea how to make the calculator replicate the actual way of calculating formulas
As a result, the Client had to create a workaround and rebuild the process in their company to account for reduced profits from offers and the new way of calculating its parameters
Fortunately, shortly after starting cooperation with the Client, we solved the problem and everything works as it should, but the Client’s losses counted in thousands of zlotys (the faulty calculator was on the site for about 2-3 months) were irretrievably lost
What is the moral of this story?
- it is worth taking the time to vet a potential business/technology partner to avoid such problems
- before you start doing something – find out how it works and don’t try to force changes
- act in accordance with reality and business processes – if they need to be adapted to the system being built, do so only in consultation with the business. At the end of the day, you are changing the way your Client’s company operates
Have a good day!
Keywords: business risk, e-commerce consulting, foreign expansion, workshops