CASE STUDY
Team Canada Trade Mission Involvement
Multiple millions of investor funding burned through; accelerating burn rate, inability to forecast completion date.
Challenge
Ascertain blocks to rolling out viable product beyond Alpha stage.
Approach
In person interviews combined with a widely distributed survey on perceived technical proficencies.
Solution
Collect and compile information from surveys and interviews and create a summary report.
Client
Withheld
Category
Technical Due Diligence
Process
We needed to cut through the haze of distrust and suspicion and provide some clarity around core competencies of all the key players.
Result
At the end of the process, we delivered an honest assessment of organizational strengths and weaknesses which enabled the client to take hard decisions focused on turning the company around.
These were early days on the web. Most sites were little more than glorified brochure-wear, and very few were connected to databases. DBMSs did not support Unicode text. While waiting to hear back about how what we wanted to do was impossible, we went ahead and built it.
Our client was responding to the horrific Kobe earthquake in Japan in 1995. Emergency housing was desperately needed and North American companies were scrambling to try and fill the demand. Transport time was fixed at a little over 3 weeks due to the necessity of shipping by ocean container. Manufacturing had been honed into a single day process. The ordering process was the bottleneck. The time zone challenge alone meant someone was always waiting for someone else to return a call. Throw in the language barrier and we had some serious challenges. Our solution shaved weeks off of what had previously taken a month or more to do. This meant our client could communicate better and respond significantly faster than their competitors. Our client's foresight and willingness to employee a native Japanese speaker, as well as their willingness to be bold during the envisioning phase, allowed us to come up with something that had never been done up until that point.
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