About Smashing Boxes
Smashing Boxes is a leading technology lab that associates with clients, taking a combined way to solving complex enterprise problems. They combine strategy, design, and building with a constant dose of entrepreneurial vision and just the best amount of disruptive industry. They believe successful products are the outcome of best partnerships. It is one of the best mobile app development company.
Services
Mobile App Development
Web Development
UI-UX Design
Custom Software Development
Internet of Things
Smashing Boxes Reviews
Write a ReviewERP rollout delivered with the change management discipline the project needed
Jisoo Kwon / CTO - HanRiver Tech Co Ltd
Verified
Jan 08, 2025
Jan 08, 2025
Project summary: Supply chain traceability from manufacturer to patient had become a compliance requirement and our existing systems had no serialisation capability whatsoever.
Project governance was one of the things that impressed me most. We had a dedicated project manager who ran tight fortnightly sprints with clear acceptance criteria, a shared backlog that gave us full visibility at all times, and a change request process that was fair and transparent. Nothing slipped through the cracks, no bill shock at the end, and the final delivery matched the original scope document almost perfectly. In my experience that kind of discipline is genuinely uncommon.
PROS
Engineering quality that our internal team can maintain without calling the vendor, thorough documentation, proactive risk identification throughout the project
CONS
Honestly nothing worth documenting — we went in with high expectations and they were met on every measure
Project TypeERP Development
IndustryPharmaceuticals & Biotechnology
Project CostLess than $10,000
DurationNov 2024 – Feb 2026
Questions & Answers
Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
As CTO at HanRiver Tech Co Ltd, I manage a cross-functional technology team serving our Pharmaceuticals & Biotechnology clients from Seoul, South Korea. 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?
Growth into new markets had exposed serious limitations in our platform. What had worked for our original user base in Seoul, South Korea was not going to scale internationally, and the ERP Development requirements for those new markets were meaningfully different. We needed a partner who had solved that kind of problem before.
What services did the company provide for your project?
Primarily ERP Development, though the scope naturally touched adjacent areas. They handled architecture design, implementation, integration with our existing systems, performance testing under realistic load, and knowledge transfer to our internal team. The breadth of what they covered without requiring us to bring in additional vendors was one of the reasons the project ran efficiently.
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 ERP Development and specific knowledge of the Pharmaceuticals & Biotechnology 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?
Better than we did at the start, which sounds like an exaggeration but is genuinely accurate. The discovery workshop they ran surfaced assumptions we had not examined and contradictions in our requirements that would have caused real problems mid-development. The functional specification they produced was the clearest articulation of our product that we had seen written down.
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?
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?
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 Pharmaceuticals & Biotechnology 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 quality of the written communication. This matters more than most clients articulate. Clear, concise, technically accurate updates that our non-technical stakeholders could read and understand. Proposals and change requests that made the decision obvious rather than obscuring it in jargon. That communication quality reduced our internal coordination overhead significantly.
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.
Game shipped on time, on budget, and rated above four stars on launch day
Noura Al-Rashidi / VP of Technology - Gulf Retail Holdings
Verified
Feb 13, 2024
Feb 13, 2024
Project summary: Several previous vendor relationships had left us cautious. We needed a partner who would be honest about complexity upfront rather than discovering it mid-project.
The technical quality of the work is the easiest thing to praise, but what I want to highlight is the communication culture on this team. Every question got a same-day response. Every risk got flagged before it became an issue. When we needed to change direction mid-project — a business decision on our side — they absorbed the change professionally, requoted fairly, and kept momentum going. That flexibility is something you cannot assess in a proposal and it turned out to be one of the most valuable things about working with them.
PROS
Technical depth across the full stack, honest and timely communication, delivered exactly what was scoped without surprise additions to the invoice
CONS
We underestimated the internal resource commitment required on our side during discovery — the team warned us, we did not listen fully, and the first sprint was slower as a result
Project TypeGame Development
IndustryMining & Metals
Project Cost$150,000 to $499,999
DurationOct 2025 – Mar 2026
Questions & Answers
Please describe your company, your role, and the industry you operate in.
Gulf Retail Holdings is a Mining & Metals business based in Abu Dhabi, UAE. As VP of Technology I am responsible for all technology investment decisions, vendor selection, and ensuring our digital capabilities match our growth ambitions. We operate in a competitive market where the quality of our software directly affects our ability to win and retain clients.
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 Game Development expertise to address it properly. We needed specialists.
What services did the company provide for your project?
Primarily Game Development, though the scope naturally touched adjacent areas. They handled architecture design, implementation, integration with our existing systems, performance testing under realistic load, and knowledge transfer to our internal team. The breadth of what they covered without requiring us to bring in additional vendors was one of the reasons the project ran efficiently.
Why did you choose this company over other providers you considered?
A direct referral from a peer who had used them for a comparable Game Development engagement in the Mining & Metals 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?
The requirements understanding was solid from early on, aided by the fact that they had prior experience in the Mining & Metals 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?
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 most direct measure is that the problem we hired them to solve no longer exists. Beyond that, the new Game Development platform has reduced our operational overhead measurably, our team spends less time managing incidents and more time on product development, and we have been able to onboard two new enterprise clients who had previously cited our technical limitations as a barrier.
What did you like most about working with this company?
Their ability to hold the business objective in mind alongside the technical task. I have worked with technically excellent agencies who lost the thread of what we were actually trying to achieve. This team never did. Every architectural decision, every trade-off conversation, every prioritisation discussion was anchored to the outcome we had agreed at the start.
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 Game Development expertise, Mining & Metals domain knowledge, and delivery discipline is genuinely difficult to find. We found it here and we intend to keep it.
Company Info
Founded
2010
Employees
50 - 249
Hourly Rate
N/A
Client Rating
5.0/5 (2 reviews)