Coe & Company Reviews

Connected device platform that gave us real-time visibility we never had before

Hamza Siddiqui / Co-Founder & CEO - Karachi Software House

Verified
Jul 15, 2024

Project summary: Inter-agency data sharing had become a bottleneck and we needed a secure, auditable integration platform that met government security classification requirements.

The thing I appreciate most in retrospect is that they were honest when something was harder than expected. Twice during the project the team came to us proactively to say that a particular component needed more time to do properly and explained why cutting corners would create problems later. We gave them the time. Both decisions were correct. The resulting product is solid and we have had none of the post-launch instability that plagued our last two technology projects.

PROS

Business-aware approach to every technical decision, strong project governance, fast turnaround on feedback, zero drama during a genuinely complex engagement

CONS

Premium pricing compared to some of the alternatives we evaluated, but the quality of the output and the absence of rework costs made the investment straightforward to justify

5.0

Overall

5.0

Quality

5.0

Schedule

5.0

Cost

5.0

Communication

Project TypeIoT Development

IndustryGovernment & Public Sector

Project CostLess than $10,000

DurationDec 2024 – Dec 2025

Questions & Answers

Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.

Karachi Software House operates across the Government & Public Sector sector with offices in Karachi, Pakistan. In my capacity as Co-Founder & CEO I oversee both the strategic and operational technology agenda. We are a growth-stage business that needed a development partner capable of scaling with us rather than constraining us.

What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?

The immediate trigger was a performance failure during our peak trading period that cost us measurably in both revenue and client trust. The root cause was architectural and our internal team did not have the IoT Development expertise to address it properly. We needed specialists.

What services did the company provide for your project?

End-to-end IoT Development delivery with a particular emphasis on the integration layer that connected the new build to our existing Government & Public Sector infrastructure. They also provided UI/UX input that was not in the original scope but which they offered proactively because they could see it would affect adoption. That kind of initiative was characteristic of how they approached the whole engagement.

Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?

We evaluated four vendors in total. Two were eliminated after the technical assessment stage because their proposed architectures showed a surface-level understanding of what we needed. This team's proposal demonstrated genuine depth in IoT Development and specific knowledge of the Government & Public Sector sector that the others could not match. The reference calls confirmed a consistent pattern of delivery.

How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?

The requirements understanding was solid from early on, aided by the fact that they had prior experience in the Government & Public Sector sector and did not need us to explain domain context that a less experienced team would have required. That background knowledge shortened the discovery phase meaningfully and reduced the volume of clarification questions during sprints.

How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?

The project management was the best I have experienced in a vendor relationship. We had fortnightly sprint reviews with structured agendas, a shared backlog that we could inspect at any point, a risk register that was actively maintained rather than created at kickoff and never opened again, and a project manager who treated our time as something worth protecting. Communication was proactive, not reactive.

Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?

On time and within the agreed budget. They had given us a range estimate at the start, which I had been sceptical of, and they landed within the lower half of that range. Their estimation accuracy came from having broken the work down in genuine detail during discovery rather than giving a rough number and hoping. It showed in every sprint.

What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?

Hard to isolate precisely because several factors changed simultaneously, but the data we can attribute directly to the new IoT Development platform shows a meaningful improvement in the metrics that matter to our Government & Public Sector business. Our account managers report that the new capability is coming up positively in client conversations, which was one of the strategic objectives we started with.

What did you like most about working with this company?

The continuity of the team. The engineers who scoped the work were the engineers who built it. That sounds like it should be standard practice but in my experience it often is not. The institutional knowledge that comes from that continuity pays dividends at every stage, particularly when you are dealing with a complex Government & Public Sector domain where context takes time to build.

Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?

Yes. The referral I would give comes with context: they are not the cheapest option and they are not the fastest to schedule. If you are optimising purely on price or looking for someone to start tomorrow, there are other choices. If you want the work done properly and a partner you can trust with a complex, high-stakes IoT Development engagement, this team is the answer.

Technically excellent, commercially aware, and genuinely pleasant to work with

Femke Hoekstra / Head of IT - Delta Logistics BV

Verified
Sep 24, 2022

Project summary: Clinical trial data management was scattered across sites and formats and we needed a unified platform that could satisfy both our data science team and our regulatory affairs function.

I am a demanding client. I have a technical background, I review code, and I have high standards for documentation and testing. This team met all of those expectations without ever seeming defensive about scrutiny. Peer code reviews were welcomed, unit test coverage was genuine rather than performative, and the API documentation was thorough enough that our own developers integrated against it without a single clarification call. That level of craft is what I look for and rarely find.

PROS

Architectural decisions that will serve us for years rather than just solving the immediate problem, knowledge transfer that left our team genuinely capable, no scope creep at all

CONS

Premium pricing compared to some of the alternatives we evaluated, but the quality of the output and the absence of rework costs made the investment straightforward to justify

5.0

Overall

5.0

Quality

5.0

Schedule

5.0

Cost

5.0

Communication

Project TypeLow-Code / No-Code Development

IndustryPharmaceuticals & Biotechnology

Project Cost$150,000 to $499,999

DurationApr 2025 – Jun 2025

Questions & Answers

Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.

I lead technology at Delta Logistics BV, a mid-sized organisation in the Pharmaceuticals & Biotechnology sector headquartered in Rotterdam, Netherlands. My remit as Head of IT covers everything from infrastructure to product development. We had reached a point where our internal engineering capacity was not sufficient to execute our roadmap without an experienced external partner.

What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?

Our Pharmaceuticals & Biotechnology regulatory environment had changed and the compliance timeline was non-negotiable. We needed to rebuild specific components of our system to meet the new requirements and our internal team was already fully committed to the core product roadmap. Bringing in a specialist Low-Code / No-Code Development partner was the only realistic path.

What services did the company provide for your project?

The core engagement was Low-Code / No-Code Development but expanded to include technical consultancy during the discovery phase, which helped us refine the requirements significantly before development began. They also took responsibility for coordinating with our third-party data providers, which removed a significant coordination burden from our internal team.

Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?

A direct referral from a peer who had used them for a comparable Low-Code / No-Code Development engagement in the Pharmaceuticals & Biotechnology space. That peer's experience had been excellent and their project profile was similar enough to ours that the recommendation carried real weight. Everything we found during our own evaluation reinforced that this was the right decision.

How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?

Extremely well. They asked detailed questions, challenged vague requirements until they were specific, and proposed sensible defaults for decisions we had not yet made rather than just leaving them open. By the time development started there was no ambiguity in the backlog, which is a rare starting position.

How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?

The project management was the best I have experienced in a vendor relationship. We had fortnightly sprint reviews with structured agendas, a shared backlog that we could inspect at any point, a risk register that was actively maintained rather than created at kickoff and never opened again, and a project manager who treated our time as something worth protecting. Communication was proactive, not reactive.

Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?

Yes. I will note that the original timeline was aggressive and I had privately expected a slip. They managed to hold it by making smart sequencing decisions early on that I only fully understood in retrospect. The budget discipline was equally good — we received a single change request for scope we had introduced ourselves and it was priced fairly.

What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?

Hard to isolate precisely because several factors changed simultaneously, but the data we can attribute directly to the new Low-Code / No-Code Development platform shows a meaningful improvement in the metrics that matter to our Pharmaceuticals & Biotechnology business. Our account managers report that the new capability is coming up positively in client conversations, which was one of the strategic objectives we started with.

What did you like most about working with this company?

The continuity of the team. The engineers who scoped the work were the engineers who built it. That sounds like it should be standard practice but in my experience it often is not. The institutional knowledge that comes from that continuity pays dividends at every stage, particularly when you are dealing with a complex Pharmaceuticals & Biotechnology domain where context takes time to build.

Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?

I recommend them to anyone who asks and occasionally to people who do not. The combination of Low-Code / No-Code Development expertise, Pharmaceuticals & Biotechnology domain knowledge, and delivery discipline is genuinely difficult to find. We found it here and we intend to keep it.

Web development done properly — performant, scalable, and a joy to maintain

Callum Stanton / GM of Technology - Suncoast Retail Group

Verified
Jun 15, 2022

Project summary: Production downtime was costing us significantly each quarter and our existing monitoring infrastructure had no predictive capability whatsoever.

We ran a structured RFP with seven vendors. Three made it to the technical evaluation stage. This team won on the strength of their technical proposal, their domain knowledge, and frankly on the quality of the questions they asked us during the process. A vendor who asks good questions in the sales phase tends to ask good questions during delivery too. That hypothesis proved correct. The project is now live, performing above the KPIs we agreed, and our stakeholders are genuinely impressed.

PROS

Business-aware approach to every technical decision, strong project governance, fast turnaround on feedback, zero drama during a genuinely complex engagement

CONS

Their calendar books up quickly which made scheduling the initial kickoff slightly challenging — a good problem for them to have and not one that affected our delivery

5.0

Overall

5.0

Quality

5.0

Schedule

5.0

Cost

5.0

Communication

Project TypeWeb Development

IndustryManufacturing

Project Cost$500,000+

DurationNov 2024 – Jan 2026

Questions & Answers

Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.

As GM of Technology at Suncoast Retail Group, I manage a cross-functional technology team serving our Manufacturing clients from Brisbane, Australia. We are a commercially focused organisation and every technology decision we make is evaluated against a clear business case. We needed a partner who understood that context, not just the technical brief.

What specific problem or business challenge led you to hire this company?

Our existing Web Development capability had accumulated years of technical debt that was slowing every new feature to a crawl. Incident frequency was rising, developer confidence was falling, and we knew a rebuild was overdue. We needed a partner with the depth to do it properly rather than apply another layer of patches.

What services did the company provide for your project?

End-to-end Web Development delivery with a particular emphasis on the integration layer that connected the new build to our existing Manufacturing infrastructure. They also provided UI/UX input that was not in the original scope but which they offered proactively because they could see it would affect adoption. That kind of initiative was characteristic of how they approached the whole engagement.

Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?

We evaluated four vendors in total. Two were eliminated after the technical assessment stage because their proposed architectures showed a surface-level understanding of what we needed. This team's proposal demonstrated genuine depth in Web Development and specific knowledge of the Manufacturing sector that the others could not match. The reference calls confirmed a consistent pattern of delivery.

How clearly did the company understand your requirements and business goals?

Thorough and precise. They translated our business language into technical requirements without losing the intent, which is a skill that sounds straightforward but frequently goes wrong. Every user story they wrote was reviewed against the original business objective before it entered the sprint and the acceptance criteria were specific enough to remove subjectivity from QA.

How was your overall experience with their communication and project management?

Outstanding. I have worked with agencies that communicate beautifully during the sales process and go quiet during delivery. This was the opposite — structured, consistent, and genuinely informative throughout. Problems were surfaced early with proposed solutions rather than just problem statements, which made the inevitable mid-project decisions much easier to make.

Did the company deliver the project on time and within your expected budget?

The project landed on the agreed delivery date and within the approved budget. We did add scope during the engagement — two features that became apparent as essential during user testing — and those were quoted, approved, and delivered without affecting the original scope timeline. That kind of clean change management is not something you can take for granted.

What tangible results or business impact have you seen since the project was completed?

The ROI case we presented to our board assumed a payback period of eighteen months. Based on current trajectory we will hit that in under a year. The efficiency gains in our Manufacturing operations have been more significant than the model projected, partly because the quality of the data coming out of the new system is enabling decisions we could not make before.

What did you like most about working with this company?

The intellectual honesty. They told us when something we wanted was a bad idea and explained why. They told us when a timeline was tight and gave us options. They did not tell us what we wanted to hear in order to win work or avoid a difficult conversation. In a long engagement that kind of relationship is far more valuable than an agency that just says yes.

Would you recommend this company to others, and would you work with them again?

Absolutely. I would recommend them with a specific note that the quality of the discovery process is where the value starts. Clients who invest properly in that phase will get the most out of the engagement. We made that investment and the returns are evident in the quality of what was delivered.

Coe & Company

Services