JLL Company Review

Anatoly Incherevskiy

Digital Business Partner — Russia & CIS

Due to the excellent UI, both internal and external stakeholders were eager to take advantage of the new system during the beta testing phase. Start Mobile implemented a comprehensive project timeline at the outset. Customers can expect a professional and dedicated partner.

For what projects/services did your company hire Start Mobile?

JLL today is no longer a consulting company. We are gradually becoming a technology company with a focus on real estate market services. That is why, as an industry leader, we are actively investing in the development of innovative solutions, our own analytical tools, we are expanding our competencies through startups and creating additional value for our clients.

Following this goal, we decided to order a mobile app and asked Start Mobile as specialists in this field. After studying the market of applications that are used in the field of commercial real estate, the company Start Mobile came to the conclusion that the interest in such solutions is low – the number of downloads is small.

This led us to the idea of conducting a more detailed and in-depth study of the needs of customers with regard to the visualization of our business processes and reinventing our own CRM. It was no longer a mobile application, but a web application adapted for iPad. This new order was also given to Start Mobile because they had already studied our needs in detail and had experience in developing such web applications.

What were your goals for this project?

• Provide customers and employees with a modern and user-friendly interface to track transaction status and any activity at the facility;
• Get additional competitive advantages at tenders;
• Increase the loyalty of current clients of the company;

Solution

How did you select this vendor?

• Choose from the top of one of the known rating of developers;
• Sent a short description with our wishes;
• We met with developers who seemed to us to understand our task better.

Describe the project in detail.

The project is something like CRM / BI for commercial real estate. More precise definition: Asset Management System. Here is a brief description of it:

This system optimizes our business processes for working with real estate objects and clients. Our clients, their objects with their entire internal structure (floors, tenants, etc.), managers and transactions are added to the system. Then, on the basis of these data there is an analysis, reporting, search, management of transactions and objects and other information processing.

What was the team composition?

The Start Mobile development team consisted of a manager, two programmers, a designer and a tester.

From our side, I was in charge of the project. I was also helped:

• National Director. Head of Office Agency Department for shaping global business goals and strategies;
• Office Leasing Director as a means of verifying that the system is performing the day-to-day tasks of employees;
• Data analyst to set up integration with our internal data sources.

Results & Feedback

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

• After the preliminary announcement of the beta-version, a lot of customers started asking for access as soon as possible, which indicates that we did everything right and achieved our business goals;
• The convenience and accessibility of the interface has increased the internal motivation of employees to use the system more actively and to enter all the data at once into our system, rather than into their internal notes, notebooks, etc.;
• We were able to bring additional standardization of data, to look at the already added information with a fresh look;
• Although the system is a web-based application, it has been specifically adapted to work on tablets. Thus, we were able to get a universal product close in convenience to the mobile application.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

We briefly outlined our vision of the system and business objectives at the very beginning of the project and then outlined the needs and various ideas. Project managers from Start Mobile structured all this information, divided it into stages and designed the system and launched the received project descriptions into development.

At first, we worked together to develop a common vision of the project, and then we moved on to iterations of 6 weeks each. Such a variant of interaction was comfortable for us and allowed us to conduct early testing of the main functionality long before the official launch and finally get a more predictable result.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

• A deep understanding of our business objectives and a desire to understand them better;
• We have historically had a rather complicated data structure and we were a little concerned about whether it would be possible to process it somehow in third-party systems. Will the developers be able to understand it correctly and build an optimal architecture. However, Start Mobile did a great job of it;
• Detailed quality system design with “safety margin” for future expansion;
• I liked the fact that Start Mobile not only acted as usual contractors, but really tried to help us to improve our business performance after the launch of the project.

Are there any areas for improvement?

We liked everything.

Rating

Quality. We are completely satisfied with the quality of work.

Scheduling. The work was done as quickly as possible. The release of the working version was done in stages. Before the final launch, we had a lot of control points that helped us to understand the state of the project and make corrections.

Cost. For the amount of work done, the cost was optimal.

How likely are you to refer Start Mobile to a friend? Yeah, we can definitely recommend this company to our friends.

Overall rating: 5 stars. We loved it. We plan to continue cooperation.