250 tickets cleared in one year. What makes SYSTEMI a partner that accelerates development at more than twice the conventional speed

Our biggest challenge was a shortage of resources and skills caused by being unable to add engineers. We had worked with another vendor since our service site launched in 2018, but the development engineering capacity was chronically short at just 0.5 person-months. We asked for additional staffing, but that never came through, so stalled tickets kept piling up — some of them had been sitting there for as long as three years.

We also frequently felt that something was lacking on the engineering side, with issues in the architecture and design and various defects. In the trunk room industry, few companies invest heavily in web marketing, so we originally held an advantageous position. But because additional development wasn't progressing, the gap between us and our competitors gradually narrowed. That sense of crisis is what led us to start considering a vendor change around March 2023.

The first deciding factor was the breadth of their talent. When they introduced the people they could assign in advance, I became confident that SYSTEMI could cover not only backend development but also the infrastructure knowledge and skills we were short on.

The second was that their development stance matched ours. They're neither the type to spend ages mass-producing extremely thorough documentation, nor are they overly skewed toward just coding. I felt they struck a good balance as a partner who moves development forward together with us.

The third factor that built trust was their track record. Beyond being a core partner of a major IT vendor, they also had a track record in finance and manufacturing, which we rated highly. Manufacturing systems demand very fine-grained specifications, so having a track record there gave us real peace of mind.

In the early stage of product development, SYSTEMI's side had one PM and two developers. Because so many unaddressed tickets remained, we strengthened the team partway through, changing it to one PM, one requirements lead, and five developers. I had originally handled requirements definition myself, but by having SYSTEMI assign one person to that role too, we were able to free up more tasks to pass to the developers. The flexibility of their staffing, adjusting to our situation, has been a real help.

My impression is that they've kept things running smoothly as a development partner. When we switched vendors, the documentation wasn't well maintained, yet they took over the work admirably. It was also reassuring that they proactively offered opinions on improving development efficiency, like "you could do this faster if you did it this way." On the quality side, the inefficient implementations that had occurred with the previous vendor were resolved, which gave us a great sense of security.

In roughly the first year after SYSTEMI joined, we were able to clear several hundred tickets. That's more than twice the speed compared to before. On top of that, the number of incidents dropped, so we've cut down the time spent firefighting. We were also able to implement add-on features that had been stalled for years — like a feature that automatically recommends nearby locations to customers waiting for an opening, and a viewing reservation feature for unattended trunk rooms. With the automatic recommendation and viewing reservation features in place, our contract conversion rate rose, and we can now respond to SEO needs in a timely way.

SYSTEMI's appeal lies in their all-round technical strength and the flexibility of their staffing. They have engineers who command the full range of skills from cloud to implementation, so whether you go with a "leave it all to us" style or one where the client handles the steering and just has them fill the gaps where people are short, they can flexibly staff to match the situation. If, like us, you want to keep driving implementation forward together with your vendor, I'd say it's well worth talking to them first.