Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
I run technology for Elbtal Digital AG, a growth-stage Energy & Utilities company based in Frankfurt, Germany. My role as Chief Innovation Officer covers product engineering, platform operations, and our vendor relationships. We'd hit a point where our internal capacity just couldn't keep pace with what the roadmap demanded.
What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?
Regulation in our Energy & Utilities segment shifted and the compliance deadline came from the regulator, not from us. The scale of the Industry-Specific Solutions changes required justified bringing in a specialist rather than pulling our internal team off the product roadmap to handle it.
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?
We were coming off a failed engagement and went into vendor selection this time with a lot more scrutiny. We asked pointed questions about how they handle scope changes, how they estimate, how they communicate bad news. The answers were specific and consistent across everyone we spoke to on their team, which gave us confidence it wasn't a rehearsed pitch.
How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?
Really well, partly because they already had Energy & Utilities experience that cut down on the amount of context we had to provide. They knew the terminology, asked the right questions, and translated our business requirements into technical specs accurately enough that development barely needed any clarification cycles.
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?
The project came in on schedule. Budget stayed within the agreed ceiling, including one scope addition we asked for ourselves, which was quoted fairly and handled without disturbing the rest of the timeline. Nothing about the invoice came as a surprise.
What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?
We went live about three months ago. User adoption beat the target we'd set by roughly 20 percent in the first month, and support ticket volume has dropped noticeably since. Features we'd shelved because the old architecture made them too expensive to build are now back on the roadmap.
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?
Without reservation. We're already in early conversations about a second engagement, and I expect this to turn into a multi-year relationship. Anyone in Energy & Utilities looking for real Industry-Specific Solutions depth paired with actual delivery discipline should have this team near the top of their list.