challenge
Sparq needed a better, more analytical way to efficiently target the most promising American cities to establish a local presence. When comparing potential cities for a new development center, there are thousands of inputs to consider, including demographics, technical skills availability, wages, costs of living, quality of life and the prevalence of higher education institutions, just to name a few. Sparq needed to quickly analyze large amounts of data from both public sources and proprietary data not available for public purchase. Sparq’s growing success in providing onshore digital engineering talent required them to speed up the process of identifying and opening new locations to meet fast-growing client demand. Time was of the essence.
solution
Our team took on the challenge of using a unique combination of results from both data mining and machine learning approaches applied against purchased third-party data to evaluate tens of thousands of data points across 59 mid-sized cities. Sparq designed a similarity mining algorithm to check for similarity percentages between city statistics and implemented a clustering algorithm to examine similarities between cities based on their statistics. Using Power BI to visualize the algorithm results helped the executive team to query the data with different weighting scenarios and quickly assess the best possible cities in which to make investments based on head-to-head comparisons. The application was built in AWS using Terraform for environment setup, React for front-end, DynamoDB for data and .NET for back-end.
results
By overlaying the data mining and machine learning approaches, we were able to drill down on the most appropriate cities with more accuracy, allowing Sparq to increase the likelihood of success and achieve an outsized return on investment. These approaches helped Sparq leadership select two new development center locations in Buffalo, NY and Baton Rouge, LA. The entire development process took less than two months compared to six months in previous site selection processes.
Accelerating Growth for Leading Manufacturing Company
Tanis Brush, a leading manufacturer of industrial and abrasive brushes, faced a critical challenge in its quoting processes. Relying on manual methods, the company encountered inefficiencies that threatened to impede its growth targets. Learn how we streamlined these processes for continued growth for our client.
Dairy Business Startup Exceeds Investor and User Expectations with Cross-Platform App
In the dairy supply chain, there are many steps and stakeholders involved: the farmer who owns livestock, the producers who develop dairy products, the retailers who commercialize the products, the consumers who buy them and so on. Even though these roles are all part of the same process, they don’t always communicate or collaborate in an optimal, transparent way. Vyla envisioned a collaborative dashboard software to better connect the production process and players to increase collaboration and improve results, but couldn’t bring that idea to life without an experienced software development partner. Learn how we helped.
Trading Business Grows its Operations Through a Custom Cloud-Based System
TYR is a commodity trading company dedicated to buying, selling and transporting products such as organic food, wood and grains, with operations across North America and Europe. In order to manage the company’s different transactions and keep information centralized, they were using a system that couldn’t keep up with the business’ growth. Plus, it was hard to understand and install. Our client needed a partner to build a custom cloud-based solution for better scalability and improved UX.
Reinvigorated Stock Management System Improves Service Quality for Pharmacy Chain
As the biggest pharmacy chain in Uruguay, our client operates an app where users can buy their goods online and get them delivered. The existing platform was unorganized and caused a lot of canceled and delayed orders, which was translating into a decrease in customer loyalty and damage to their brand image. Learn how we partnered to develop a new platform for better stock management and improved customer satisfaction.