Emnos Testimonial

About Emnos
Emnos is a company that specializes in customer insight. We work within the retail sector and also the consumer markets where we give customer information so they know what their customer is actually doing.

Choosing Sierra Atlantic
We chose Sierra Atlantic after careful consideration mainly because of two reasons-their delivery capability in terms of their technological knowledge and also in terms of the way that Sierra Atlantic operates. One of the things that I’ve noticed that is significantly different from other companies is that Sierra Atlantic really cares about their people. That makes a huge difference to the motivation of the team. When we launched the project, the enthusiasm within the team and the motivation was incredible and it gave us a hue feeling of comfort. Of course every engagement that you’ve won is going to have its problems and one of the telling things is how we handle those problems in the future. But I have a very good feeling that Sierra Atlantic can actually handle these things in a very cooperative manner. In the end what’s very important for me is the partnership element and I think that anyone coming into an offshoring outsourcing engagement needs to approach this from a partnership point of view. This is not something you can just outsource or push away, delegate responsibility. In the end, you guys are going to be developing my product. Therefore you become extremely strategic to our company. Its therefore very important that not only as a company that we connect to you but also where we come from, our motivation, our strategies, our business and our products but also that you are able to connect to us and then empathies with our products, with our business, our strategies and I think that is what makes a very successful engagement.

Sierra Atlantic Senior Executive commitment
Another important thing is that there is senior executive commitment on both sides and I’ve been extremely impressed with a huge amount of your executive staff, executive directors including Allen Deary who runs the outsource product development. Hearing and interacting with your team and meeting expectations within the engagement is very important. We will see each other every three months at least at the quarterly business review which is going to be extremely important. The measurements that we get, the information I get is vital because not only does it tell me how much each release costs for a product or how much each feature costs and over time I can see exactly whether it is getting cheaper which it should as we progress in this engagement or if there’s a problem. Every engagement at one point as I said before will have a problem and identifying those problems early on and identifying any issues early on is vital. The information that we get out of business reviews is vital and it is absolutely vital that the executives, myself, Allen, my CEO are actually their present and engaged at all times.

Initial skepticism
Yes skepticism I have dealt with a few companies and not all of them were well. One of the major issues is culture. I think Indians don’t, from a cultural point of view like giving bad news and one of the good things about Sierra is that issue is actually highlighted. Let the customer have the bad news early. Don’t hide things, don’t try and fix it. Let everyone know. Openness is the key and I think in other companies it’s very well hid. Hide the problem as well as you can Right? As soon as that happens, trust breaks down, the engagement breaks down, you get very very bad results and nothing works anymore.Being an adult about these things is helpful. I’ve worked with people before who scream and yell when there’s a problem and they want the impossible. Don’t ask for the impossible. Ask for a challenging amount of work. Be very pragmatic about what you can expect. But having said that now, I haven’t gone into this with just one purpose. I don’t want a team that has just got a code for me. What is very important is that I get intelligence, engineers very much like I’d hire anyone onshore is how I would approach hiring this team. And the fact that we’ve named people that they’re not going to be swapped out without my knowing that all of these things that happen in other companies don’t happen in Sierra Atlantic. All of these things actually contribute to the success of the engagement and I know that everyone is extremely motivated to get my releases out and our company depends on them.

Infrastructure facilities at Sierra Atlantic
Facilities are amazing, absolutely amazing. I think one a large part of why this company is so productive and successful is because of the environment. The environment is second to none. It is a very pleasant office, very pleasant environment and the personnel policies that have been implemented, shown to me have all contributed to the productivity in the end. Also the longevity of the member staff, everyone knows that retaining staff is challenging. There is a very very high degree of turnover in the market today but there’s much lesser turnover on Sierra because people care.

What differentiates Sierra Atlantic
I think the main thing is openness, honesty, communication the fact that you don’t swap out talented staff after three weeks that you don’t start an engagement with the super guys and you end up with the grunts straightaway. I like the fact that there’s shadowing so junior staff or university graduates are led on a team. They learn about my product, work with my product and when they are ready they come on board. They’re ready now, they’re productive, and they’ve been working with the teams up front. I think that’s great. I think that really does differentiate Sierra from the others to a huge extent. Sierra approaches the engagements not on a short term view and this I think really is one of those thing that you get very often. When you have someone working on your product on a long term, the more stable your team is the more valuable they are, the more value you get out of them. Sierra recognized this and says, the longer we can keep the team together the better and the way that Sierra approached the engagement is from a ten year perspective at least. I know that you’ve had engagements in excess of ten years and that’s how you approach every engagement. You don’t expect an engagement to end after two years.

Recommending Sierra Atlantic
Definitely. Without a doubt. I think your capability, the way you approach an engagement is great and I have yet to find it in another company and I’ve worked with a few.

Highlight of the engagement
The enthusiasm of the team is great but it does take effort. It’s not free. I’m here as often as I can be. I interact with my team and I make the feel valuable. I think that’s my contribution. I don’t hold them at arm’s length and it’s because they are valuable and they know that and I know that. I think that’s important.

emnos is a consulting and services business helping to achieve "customer-centric growth". They are working successfully for some of the world’s leading retailers, consumer goods manufacturers and consumer businesses in sectors such as utilities, financial services and telecommunications.

www.emnos.com