Using QA Team Outsourcing to Overcome Testing Challenges in Logistics

The Background

Our client is a reputable logistics and transportation software provider based in Europe. Being in the market for over three decades, the company now serves over 200k users globally with solutions for transportation, warehousing, logistics finance, and freight delivery management.

After an internal audit, the client decided to improve its testing capabilities and adopt new technologies to ensure the friction-free performance of their solutions and to remain competitive in the market. For this purpose, they needed to extend their existing testing team with additional talent. They started looking for a vendor with an appropriate offering.

The Challenge

The client had several specifications that made the choice of vendor quite complex.

Firstly, they needed QA experts with experience in working with logistics IT companies and with a deep knowledge of the transportation business, supply chain operations, logistics accounting, etc. The hired team would also need to be capable of following the same business management approach as the existing in-house team.

Due to the urgency of rolling out the testing stage, the above factors were essential to keep operations streamlined.

Secondly, the client was looking for a vendor with a similar mindset to ensure mutual understanding between team members and thus smoother processes. So they narrowed their selection to vendors from Europe.

Thirdly, the company needed a team that was available to start cooperation right away but that could handle the tight time frame without compromising the quality of the work.

Strategic Partnership

To deliver our services smoothly and build long-lasting partnerships, we are guided by the following principles: transparent communication, close cooperation, well-documented service provision, and agile improvement.

During the initial stage, we arranged the paperwork and started interviewing the QA specialists on our roster with the relevant testing skills to provide the client with a ready-to-hire team.

After the crew of 22 QA specialists and team leads was approved, we started closely cooperating with the client’s dev teams. We set the ball rolling by transferring the knowledge base and fine-tuning the processes we needed for testing. Together with the knowledge transfer, discovery phase, and getting the environment set up, it took us two months to roll out fully-fledged QA provision.

The performance of our dedicated testing crew during the first year of partnership left our client with no doubt that we could also improve their development processes. As a result, we also started outsourcing our developers. This move helped us align the development and testing workflows to ensure the continuous monitoring and improvement of the client’s solutions.

The Results

Quick start

pwrteams has been providing clearly documented testing processes from the get-go. During our cooperation, we’ve achieved the following results:

• Streamlined the testing processes of the client’s in-house and external projects

• Developed and tested various transportation solutions, including apps for shippers and carriers

• Established a long-term outsourcing partnership at all stages of the client’s development pipeline

This helped reduce the audit-related workload for the client, ensure continuous delivery, and form a solid base for non-stop improvement in the long term. From the short-term perspective, it allowed our QA specialists to establish the efficient, objective-focused workflow we maintain today.

In this case, we proved our reputation as a versatile, skill-rich tech vendor, and we continue to cooperate with our client not only in the testing domain but also in the development field. Currently, we outsource two QA teams and three Java development teams to our client. The teams follow the agile design-develop-test-improve approach to keep our client’s solutions ahead of the competition.