Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
As Director of IT Strategy at Kirin Digital KK I oversee technology spend and delivery across our Human Resources operations out of Yokohama, Japan. We're a commercially minded business, so every technology decision gets judged on what it actually contributes to the bottom line, not on how elegant it looks on paper.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
A competitor move forced our hand and compressed a roadmap item we'd planned for the following year. The Industry-Specific Solutions investment we'd scheduled twelve months out suddenly needed to happen in six, and building it internally in that window wasn't realistic.
What services did the company provide for your project?
The scope ran the full Industry-Specific Solutions lifecycle — discovery, requirements, architecture, development across roughly a dozen sprints, integration testing, performance validation, deployment, and a four-week hypercare window afterward. They also handed over full documentation and ran a knowledge transfer session for our internal team.
Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?
The questions they asked during the briefing stage told us most of what we needed to know. Vendors who ask sharp questions during sales tend to bring that same rigor into delivery, and that held up. The technical proposal had real substance, the team was senior from the start, and the pricing was straightforward.
How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?
Better than we understood them ourselves, honestly. The workshops they ran surfaced assumptions we'd never questioned and exposed a few requirements that flatly contradicted each other. Sorting that out before development started saved us from what would have been serious rework later.
How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?
Proactive and well-calibrated. Technical detail for the engineering side, plain summaries for the steering group, and risk flags that came with a proposed fix attached rather than just a problem statement. The biweekly sprint reviews kept our stakeholders in the loop without requiring them to sit in on every working session.
Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?
Both, yes. One sprint hit a one-week delay from a third-party API dependency outside anyone's control. The team flagged it three weeks ahead of time, laid out two options, and we picked an approach that clawed the schedule back within the same sprint. That's the kind of foresight that separates real project management from just reacting to problems.
What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?
Hard to isolate perfectly given everything else going on in the business, but the numbers we can attribute directly to the Industry-Specific Solutions work are solid: session duration up, conversion up, error rate down, and our NPS for that touchpoint has moved noticeably. Our account managers say it's coming up positively in client conversations now too.
What did you like most about working with this company?
What they did after launch. A lot of vendors treat go-live as the finish line. This team treated it as the start of a different phase — the hypercare period was substantial, the documentation held up in practice, and they checked back in at the thirty and ninety day marks to go over production metrics with us unprompted.
Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?
Yes, no hesitation. I've already referred them twice within my own Human Resources network, both times to people facing Industry-Specific Solutions problems similar to ours. I made those referrals confidently because I know the experience I had was repeatable, not a one-off stroke of luck on our project.