Case Study 1 - Offshore Development Center for European Software Company

The Customer

The customer is a Medium sized Software Development company based in The Netherlands, with a staff of 20 people, including developers, project managers and customer support executives.

The Challenge

With an increased need to automate processes and tasks, the customer was overwhelmed with the demand for their services, to consult and develop solutions. With the increase in work load the customer was forced to turn down new project requests, which obviously did not help them grow.

Increasing manpower locally was an option the customer did not want to use, because of increased overheads and problems in future in case they did not have the same amount of work. Local policies do not allow them to fire people overnight.

The Solution

S4support studied the requirements of the customer in terms of additional resources and came up with a solution which allowed the customer to convert all his existing people to project managers, who would work with Indian Developers. The Indian team would be involved in most of the development, while their European project managers plan all the tasks as per project requirements

Phase 1: Team 1 Setup, team size 5 resources

• A team of 5 c#,.net developers was setup. The team consisted of 4 senior developers and 1 project manager who coordinated with the European team.
  
  
• Team members were actively available on Instant Messengers and Skype for seamless communication.
  
  
• A project management system was used, to log work which is done, and the European team added their own tasks assigning it to various offshore team members.
  
  
• Result: The 4 month project was completed in record time, and the European company bagged the order for expansion of this basic system which was developed.

Phase 2: Team 1 Increased to 10 resources

Team 2 Setup with 5 resources

• With the success of Phase 1, the existing team was increased to 10 to take care of the additional requirements. 4 more senior developers were added along with 1 new project manager.
  
  
• Another team of 5 developers was setup, with php / ajax experience. The customer wanted to build their own content management system using php and ajax using this team, in addition to maintenance work for existing customers.

The Benefits

• Lower overhead costs upto 65% savings - helps the company become competitive
  
  
• Quick increase / decrease in team size as and when needed
  
  
• Easily available resources for any platform
  
  
• Working in common time zone as the customer
  
  
• Existing people move to higher level tasks such as planning, helping the company get more at the same cost

Case Study 2 - Support Desk and Network Operation Center (NOC) for US based Hosting Company

The Customer

The client is one of the leading Hosting companies in North America with over 25,000 hosted accounts, 30 servers and over 300 resellers across various time zones.

The Challenge

The hosting industry is very competitive, with various companies offering lower prices it is a challenge to maintain the same level of customer support and also maintain machines which may sometimes be overloaded with a little extra customers.

The Solution

S4support setup a team of 9 people to support customers 24 hours, 7 days a week. A shift pattern was designed of 8 hours each, which included a hand over mechanism, so that open tasks could be taken care of even with people moving in and out of the shift. 4 Shifts were designed with 2 people each to cover 24 hours and 7 days, along with 1 project manager, to manage shifts and high level tasks.

Training of resources was done collectively by S4support and the client, and documents of common problems were provided and created.

Systems Used

• A trouble ticket system is used to enable multiple people to login, and check problems and also read history of a particular case. The ticket system also enabled easy training of people on the existing systems.
  
  
• A Knowledge Base is setup using the trouble ticket system, to record common problems and their solutions.
  
  
• A VOIP phone is also setup to enable voice based support.
  
  
• A Virtual Private Network is setup, so that administrators could securely login to servers and the client's local network in the US.
  
  
• A Log Management System is used to log the complaints, calls and work done by each person to help understand regular problems. This helped us to automate tasks which customers had a regular problem with, helping to reduce the time spent by the resources on these tasks.

The Benefits

• Lower running costs
  
  
• 24 X 7 maintenance, monitoring, troubleshooting and customer support
  
  
• Instant response to customer queries
  
  
• Lower time for training and recruitment
  
  
• Quick Expansion to cater to more customers seamlessly.
  
  
• Completely Expandable solution, in case the customer wanted to cater to double the number of customers, it would be simple to increase the number of resources in India.