The reasons they chose SYSTEMI: "proposal strength" and "a sense of speed" — end to end from PoC through technology selection to implementation

Thankfully, inquiries for projects have been increasing lately, and we've had an ongoing shortage of developers. So we needed development partners to secure people for us, and we reached out to several companies. With most partners, though, the proposals tend to be people-focused — "we can offer this many people in such-and-such month."

Against that backdrop, SYSTEMI proposes from the system architecture diagram and technology selection on up. This time too, they gave us a system proposal document, and they went so far as to grasp the requirements and propose details like "this kind of API development will be needed." When a partner proposes to that level, it lowers our management and communication costs and makes things easier.

We were short on the resources to handle the development part we'd requested in-house, so it was an enormous help. We've also been working with them since July 2023, and in most cases we ask them to handle everything from effort estimation to technical proposals. With their track record, there was a certain degree of trust there from the start.

The project as a whole was building a certain education service, and our part was the payment system within it. We integrated Stripe's API into the service. It needed to support both credit card and convenience-store payments, and we had to make sure the payment processing fit each of those business flows.

For example, invoice payments involve a flow of "finalizing the billed amount, creating and sending the invoice, then confirming receipt of payment," whereas with credit cards, finalizing the charge means it's billed immediately. Absorbing that difference in flows was the hardest part this time. Convenience-store payments have a complex combination of payment status and service provision, with different logic for the initial sign-up, recurring billing, and the trial period. Stripe is originally an overseas service, and there was little documentation on convenience-store payments, so it required careful research and a lot of trial and error.

By collaborating with SYSTEMI, who have plenty of experience handling payment systems, I believe we were able to deliver the service to our customers more quickly.

The best thing about SYSTEMI is, above all, their sense of speed. We ask them for proposals on other projects too, and they get their hands moving right from the PoC (proof of concept) stage. For instance, when we consult them about a data analysis project, they do the technical investigation and come back with "here's an angle you could take." I feel their proposal speed is extremely fast.

Also, being able to "hand over a whole job and have it taken off your plate" is a major point of differentiation from other companies. There aren't many partner companies that will think things through with you all the way from research to proposal. When there's something we lack the expertise for, or that we can't fully solve internally, we can think, "Let's try consulting SYSTEMI." They're a company that truly deserves the title of "partner."