Northmann

Northmann is a Danish-based company that develops intelligent Digital Asset Management Systems. Northmann is a supplier to some of the World's leading brand name companies, such as IKEA, TripleArc (Virgin), SCA (Libero, Libresse, Edet), Goteborgstryckeriet and many more. Company's philosophy is based on delivering an intelligent and user-friendly DAM solution that clearly and directly prove to be profitable to their customers. Northmann works with rationalizing processes and securing quality, regardless of the medium involved.

In Spring of 2008 Northmann got the opportunity for expanding our production and thus needed to find the right people, not only with high technical skills but also for the right price. So we started to look into the possibility of outsourcing and in doing this we checked out the market thoroughly, we talked with different vendors and other companies that already were outsourcing, including some of Ciklum's existing clients.

We knew from the beginning that we wanted the team based model, since we, in this way, would have a full control over the team and its deliveries and they would be integrated into our organization. We believed that this approach would optimize the teams' chance of acquiring the most knowledge about the product we were to develop and through this, a sense of ownership. We shopped around before we made our choice, and it was not only the team based model that Ciklum offers that made our decision, but also that we had a good feeling about Ciklum as an organization – we liked the fact that Ciklum is well structured and holds Danish management. But most important of all – Ciklum presented the right candidates to us with a very high hit-ratio to our expectations. When the choice was made to start up with Ciklum, we chose to start the team up in Dnepropetrovsk, since this was the location where we could find the best employees for our team.

We quickly found that Ciklum was a good choice, because we not only got the access to the whole infrastructure that Ciklum offers (HR department, Administration, Finance, IT and Service and Consulting department) but also the strong and positive work environment of Ciklum.

Ciklum's HR department found and presented us with a pool of suitable candidates and we travelled to Ukraine personally for the first interviews. After the first day we had found two new employees, one of which is our Team leader in Dnepropetrovsk today and he right away started helping with the further interviews. We feel that we from day one got a good team and to this day there have been no need for replacements.

Before the team started their first working day we had planned the whole startup; the team had their first working week for Northmann in Denmark where they were introduced to our company and the tasks ahead of us. When the team was back in Ukraine, they were tasked to write their own specs from the information they had gathered in Denmark. The reason for this approach was to make sure that they had understood not only the tasks, but also our business.

Following the start-up session in Denmark, a part of the Danish team traveled to Dnepropetrovsk to go over the project specifications and together with the team take part in a two-day SCRUM training session arranged by the Ciklum Services and Consulting (CSC) team. The objective with this was to give us all a common project management platform to start out from. 14 days after we returned to Denmark the team sent us their first delivery. Initially we had expected to do more traveling, but since we from the very beginning had got the setup up and running, we are now down to going to Dnepropetrovsk every 2-3 months.

To our experience, the key advantages of working with Ciklum are the full-service offering that Ciklum provides and the fact that the Ciklum organization is there for us; always willing to help and support. These are the main factors that helped us realize that making the investment in starting up with outsourcing was worthwhile.

Reference date: May 2009