Programmers Beyond IT

Fire Engine RED is a fully remote marketing, data, technology, and consulting services company that puts its clients first. With a solid portfolio of products and solutions for the education industry, Fire Engine RED has established a fast-paced innovation process, based on feedback cycles from its clients. This has helped the company build easy-to-use products and services for over 300 educational institutions across 20+ years. Programmers’ subsidiary Actminds has worked alongside Fire Engine RED since 2018.

The partnership between the two companies started as a small engagement, supporting Fire Engine RED to quickly ramp up its product development teams. This expansion allowed them to accelerate the development of product improvements and new product features. The success of this strategy led to a more long-term partnership. Today, Programmers’ development team members are considered a true part of the Fire Engine RED team.

Carlos Cardoso, Programmers Operations Manager, says the partnership embodies “a combination of elements – from Programmers’ software development expertise, to the way we work closely with our clients, by allowing them to focus on the things that matter most to their growing business which demonstrated the value that Programmers delivers.”

Building a Stronger Foundation While Innovating With New Features
This partnership enabled Fire Engine RED to execute different strategies and shift development efforts as needed. According to Katrina Masiak, Vice President of Projects at Fire Engine RED, the company has developers who focus on scaling the software platform and improving performance. Meanwhile, other teams focus on building out MVPs (Minimum Viable Products) quickly and efficiently. This dual capability allows the company to get brand new features out to clients in a timely manner, perfectly showcasing their fast-paced innovation process. “At the same time we are focused on making our foundation better, we can also have small teams designing and implementing new product features to exceed our clients’ expectations and to attract new clients,” said Katrina.

Programmers provides continual strategic support focused on strengthening Fire Engine RED’s current technology and software products, as well as the ability to efficiently explore new initiatives and implement MVPs without needing to switch gears and reassign current teams. In addition, the partnership also brings value to defining product architecture and planning. That’s why Programmers stands out as a strong software development company to help Fire Engine RED achieve its goals and help its clients.

The Rise of Remote Teams
Today, because of COVID-19 restrictions, most companies must learn how to work with distributed teams. For Fire Engine RED, this is no challenge; the company has been fully remote since it was founded in 2001 and has achieved outstanding success with this model. Shelly J. Spiegel, CEO & Chief Creative Officer of Fire Engine RED, even wrote a book on setting up, leading, and managing a 100% remote company.

Among the many reasons to operate 100% remotely is the ability to attract and retain top talent. This is becoming harder every day, as companies compete to find and keep the right employees. Programmers’ ability to sustain a low turn-over rate and its strong culture and practices to find, retain, and help develop talent, are key value propositions as well.

“Programmers is very proud to be featured as a trusted service provider and to have such great success stories to share with Fire Engine RED,” concludes Carlos.

About Programmers
Programmers is a software development company based in Chicago, IL. With 30 years of experience, 250+ specialists, professional certifications, and industry awards, Programmers is the technology solution provider that enables digital transformation in companies of different sizes and in various fields.

Learn how Programmers’ subsidiary Actminds helps Exaktime improve its products with strong digital practices and quickly ramp up development, allowing the company to focus on domain knowledge.
Mobile workforce management company ExakTime, which helps construction, field service, landscaping, transportation, event management, oil and gas, and mining companies maximize productivity with time-tracking tools and processes, enjoyed years of consistent growth. But that growth came with a price. As the company grew and took on more sizable clients, its IT department realized it could no longer remain nimble without offering access to its products from anywhere, anytime.

According to Wayne Wise, ExakTime’s Technology VP, “ExakTime’s marketing tagline is Mobile Workforce Management. What that really means is, we go in and replace paper timecards. 90% of our customers come from paper timecards, and that’s where we look to provide that point of digital transformation for them”.

“Some of the challenges we faced when we were on an on-prem solution, one, supporting customers were difficult. We didn’t have access to their database, so we would have to copy their database down to our environment to troubleshoot, to help resolve some of their issues. Also, getting customers to update their software packages on a regular basis was difficult” highlighted Jennifer Byrne, Senior Project Manager at ExakTime.

Digital Product Modernization: The Solution
“We needed to go to the cloud. The whole SaaS product, the SaaS model, to get deeper penetrations in the company. So, we started looking at providers. We had tried some other providers prior to coming to Microsoft, and we truly found our home when we found Azure. It was a spot that we were able to take our desktop product and lift and shift from this on-prem product and transition it into this great SaaS product called Time Summit Connect. And that model let us take it in stages, and we were able to focus on core components of transitioning from not only that on-prem model, but we had an on-prem hardware solution that we provided, that we hosted. And it let us transition both of those things at once with very low risk and very easily”, added Wayne.

Carlos Cardoso, Programmers’ Operations Manager, points out that “while ExakTime was initially skeptical of working with distributed teams, they quickly came to trust our expertise and technical skills. Today, we work side-by-side with the ExakTime team to expand their digital product portfolio and build valuable features for their users — allowing ExakTime to focus on the things that matter most to their growing business.

According to Jennifer, “Here at Exaktime since we’ve moved to Time Summit Connect and doing an cloud-based application our growth has been phenomenal. The amount of time it took us to get our customers in the first 10 years, we’ve got that many in a year and a half now, and we expect to double that in the next year”.

A leading company in the energy sector turned to Programmers’ expertise to develop a new e-commerce platform – one that brings together all of its services to residential customers. You can now purchase its products and services in a 100 percent digital environment.

One leading company in the energy sector for over 20 years wanted to go beyond keeping pace with the competition. They wanted to prepare for the eventual opening of the free energy market and come out ahead of other energy suppliers. So this leading company in the energy sector turned to Programmers’ expertise to develop a new e-commerce platform – one that brings together all of its services to residential customers. You can now purchase its products and services in a 100 percent digital environment.

We conceived and developed this platform using the Agile Experience, Programmers’ exclusive methodology. We combine Agile practices and processes with our digital expertise to accelerate getting the platform to market. The Agile practices we used, and the alignment between teams and business needs, were essential to respond to user feedback and build a modern product. With these, we brought the first source of online revenue for this client.

A Successful Product
According to the company’s Head of B2C Business, the use of Programmers methodology was fundamental in their platform’s development.
Fully integrated with the company’s ERP and CRM, the e-commerce platform aggregates all the company’s interactions with its clients. We used a modern architecture with microservices and server-less components. This came with a host of benefits:

Ensuring the platform’s high performance.
Facilitating future updates with new features and improvements.
Enabling the platform to react to market changes more quickly.
Adding scalability and easy evolution.
Optimizing the final cost of maintenance.
Next, we collected data on consumption patterns and used analytics to guide future business decisions. “We will need more and more data to navigate in this digital environment, which is something totally innovative for such a traditional sector as energy. We’ve already defined 300 indicators for mapping,” commented the Head of B2C Business.

There is a wide range of services available in the new e-commerce platform, from solar panel installations and electric car chargers to insurance and residential maintenance services.

A Successful Partnership
The partnership between Programmers and this leading energy company is ongoing since 2015. It is a truly consolidated partnership on several areas of the company, all focused on innovation and digital transformation.

For the Head of B2C Business, Programmers’ choices in the development of the e-commerce platform spoke to their training and experience. “…A high degree of knowledge in the industry certainly credited Programmers as a partner in this initiative. Another strong point is that it is a company that favors close relationships with the customer, which gave us confidence and security. And the fact that they have Agile DNA guaranteed the synergy that we needed to develop this innovative product for the energy market.”

The Programmers Agile Experience provides an incremental and interactive way to develop digital platforms for businesses in various industries. Through this methodology, Programmers ensures full alignment between the company’s product leadership, stakeholders, and every area involved in the product development. It evolves with customer feedback and internal prioritizations, allowing companies to innovate with agility.

The results? Digital products with quick value generation, flexible implementation scope, and early ROI.