Third try is a charm: After two offshore vendors fail to deliver, Gearworks finds a valuable partner in Coherent Solutions.

Technology, time zone and language differences prevent past success

When Odell Tuttle first hired Coherent Solutions, Inc. to provide outsourced development services, he warned the team that "the bar would be very, very high."

As Director of Software Development for Gearworks, which develops on-demand, location-intelligent mobile workforce management applications, Tuttle had just spent nearly a year in disappointing relationships with two other outsourcing firms-one in India and one in China-and he wasn't about to be disappointed again.

One of the biggest issues with those firms was poor communication. "A lot was lost in translation, and both firms tended to charge ahead, just to meet a deadline, before they really knew what we wanted," Tuttle said. There was also very little overlap between the workday of Tuttle's local team and his offshore teams, and he was frustrated with what he described as a "bait and switch" game. "They sold us their best resources; but a week into the effort, they moved them to other projects and we never saw them again," he said.

Finally, the nature of Gearworks' technology was a challenge for the Indian and Chinese firms. Gearworks deals with several complex technologies, such as GPS and mobile cellular technology, that are not available in those countries. "We ended up spending 90 percent of our time communicating background and technical issues to our offshore teams," Tuttle explained. "And even then, everything we got back from them had to be re-worked before we could assimilate it into our product. Ultimately, everything we gained economically because of the lower-cost resources…We lost all that and more due to these issues."

Coherent overcomes traditional barriers

So after 10 months of disappointments, Tuttle admitted, "We were pretty fried on offshore because we had invested so much and gotten so little value." But he remained committed to finding an offshore partner to provide affordable software development skills as part of Gearworks' overall growth strategy. Tuttle found the partner he needed in Coherent, which is headquartered in Minneapolis and has a development office in Minsk, Belarus.

"The biggest difference with Coherent is that we have a delivery manager who works with us to help manage the team," said Tuttle. The quality of Coherent's deliverables is also much higher, and he sees a noticeable difference in the firm's attention to quality and detail.

Tuttle has also been able to turn his software development operation into a 24x7 shop with the combined efforts of his local team and the CSI team in Minsk. The groups are continuously integrated, the software is always fully compiled and everyone sees the most current product at all times.

Most important, he added, Coherent's employees ask questions. "They aren't afraid to question our ideas, approach and principles," he said. "They don't go off and develop something blindly. And they don't have issues dealing with our complex technologies like our other vendors did."

New tools get customers online quickly and enable same-day service

Coherent has delivered a variety of work for Gearworks, from completing basic maintenance to integrating Gearworks' product into client organizations to building entirely new product features into Gearworks' Web interface.

"They've been able to deliver several user interface features that we never had time to build-tools that saved our support team a great deal of time and allowed us to roll out new devices much more quickly than we could before," Tuttle said.

One tool that Coherent built automated a manual data entry function and allowed Gearworks customers to assume responsibility for the function if they desired. As a result, the Gearworks Customer Support organization saved four hours per customer request and decreased the request turnaround time from three business days to same-day service. In addition, customers can now perform the function themselves in minutes without having to contact Gearworks at all.

Another tool Coherent developed significantly reduced the time to provision new customers on Gearworks products, according to Tuttle. "Making a good first impression is very important to us, and part of that is getting customers up and running on our products quickly," he said. "CSI developed a tool that has reduced the time to provision a new customer by 50 percent."