Case Study

Sieena Helps HR Application become SaaS

Enabled in Record Time

Sieena Highlights Growth of First Time Outsourcing During Recession

Overview
Psycowin is a leading Human Resources Management software provider, with products
that help HR managers determine skills, evaluate employees, and predict performance.
In business since 1987, they have become the de-facto human resources application in
Latin America; a majority of the region's top corporations use their software to manage
various HR functions.

A core component of their offering is the evaluation of potential employees based on

various psychological factors. Traditionally HR managers would take up to two hours to
build an accurate psychographic profile of potential employees. With Psycowin's
software, that process has been cut down to 10 minutes, freeing up an HR manager's
time to more valuable activities.

The Challenge
Since their start, almost 20 years ago Psycowin’s products have gained considerable
market share. At the same time, company president José Villarreal realized that fast
moving changes in technology were threatening to make his technology obsolete – so he
decided to take quick action.

Villarreal recognized the need to upgrade their software architecture from a

client/server on-premise model, to an on-demand model. Additionally, due to the
changing requirements and sophistication of his corporate clients and their widespread
adoption of ERP applications, they needed more than a stand-alone employee evaluation
system. Villarreal saw that Psycowin had to provide a complete solution to meet the
needs of his customers’ Human Resources processes.

That's when the Psycowin team decided to develop their new product, Pyxoom, an HR
application with built-in workflows delivered using the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
model.

www.sieena.com

Phone: (310) 455-6188 | Fax: (310) 564-0344

1901 Avenue of the Stars 2nd Floor; Los Angeles, California, 90067
 Case Study
Sieena Helps HR Application become SaaS
Enabled in Record Time

However, Psycowin faced several challenges. The recent economic recession forced
Psycowin to cut resources, including development staff. Additionally, the new SaaS
delivery model required a new skill set that Psycowin’s current development staff was
not entirely comfortable with.

Villarreal decided that in order to market the system quicker without waiting for his
developers to become fully versed in web services methodologies, and at the same time
to keep his current staff lean, he needed to hire an outside software development firm.

Psycowin was already working with two clients who had requested this type of
application and required urgent delivery. He needed to work with a company that could
provide him a guaranteed delivery date on a fixed-cost basis.

The Solution
Psycowin hired Sieena, a Los Angeles-based application development firm and Microsoft
Gold Certified Partner with nearshore development offices in Monterrey, Mexico.

Due to the time-sensitive nature of the project, they hired Sieena because of its solid
development processes, years of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) development experience,
and expertise working with mission-critical HR applications. Finally, Sieena agreed to
offer a guaranteed delivery date and a fixed-cost contract.

What Sieena brought to Psycowin's Pyxoom project was a methodology that helped them
develop the application on time and on budget, with the exact requirements the
company's HR and organizational psychology subject matter experts required.

• Project Management: Sieena's experience as a software outsourcing business

have made them experts in project management. They assigned a project
management team to organize and plan the execution of the project, and
provided training and oversight to Psycowin’s developers, who were already
expert coders but needed assistance with web applications.
• Development: The project was divided into different modules; each of them
followed three different steps. Following iterative development, the project team
was able to finish in record time while meeting all the project goals including the
full scope and high quality demanded by Psycowin.

www.sieena.com

Phone: (310) 455-6188 | Fax: (310) 564-0344

1901 Avenue of the Stars 2nd Floor; Los Angeles, California, 90067
 Case Study
Sieena Helps HR Application become SaaS
Enabled in Record Time

• Discovery:
Discovery: After a substantial discovery process that included interviews with
Psycowin’s developers and the company's subject-matter experts; Sieena
analyzed the company's needs and wrote a detailed requirements document that
served as the basis for the project.
• Planning: The functional requirements from the discovery phase were
translated into a design document which mapped out in detail how the software
should be built. This document provided Psycowin’s developers a guide to write
the code and build the application.
• Development: Psycowin's developers were able to build Pyxoom based on the
discovery and planning documents. Through code and design reviews, all
deliverables from the developers were carefully reviewed and improved to
maintain the high quality standards Sieena expects from its own development
team.

Psycowin's developers, with guidance from Sieena's project management team, built the
application using Microsoft development tools such as ASP.NET 3.5, MS Chart Control,
SQL Server 2008, Reporting Service and Dundas Chart. Sieena provided special
guidance related to the multi-tenant requirements of the application's SaaS
architecture, and provided an infrastructure robust enough to manage terabytes of data.

Benefits
Villarreal was satisfied with the final results; before the financial crisis, he always made
sure Psycowin had enough resources to cover any development challenges that might
arise. However, as a result of the economic crisis he realized it was difficult to maintain
additional resources on staff while the market remained unstable.

“With Sieena I was able to ramp up quickly without having to add fixed costs to
my bottom line,” Villarreal said. “Sieena helped me develop a new product so I
could avoid hiring additional developers or waste valuable time waiting for my
current resources to ramp up on web services technologies.”

Additionally, Sieena, together with Psycowin's development staff, was able to complete
the project in 8 weeks from beginning to end, enabling them to deliver an initial version
of the product to two of Psycowin's customers who required urgent delivery.

www.sieena.com

Phone: (310) 455-6188 | Fax: (310) 564-0344

1901 Avenue of the Stars 2nd Floor; Los Angeles, California, 90067
 Case Study
Sieena Helps HR Application become SaaS
Enabled in Record Time

Finally, Psycowin leveraged Sieena's HR expertise to deliver an HR application with a

workflow system that was very practical, easy-to-use and required no additional
configuration.

“I'm going to continue working with Sieena to develop new products with them,”
Villarreal said.

About Sieena
Since 2004, Sieena a Microsoft Gold national corporations. To learn more
Certified Partner has provided about how Sieena can meet your
comprehensive IT support and software development goals, please
comprehensive nearshore software contact us.
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internet applications and customized
SharePoint deployments. The award- Contact Us
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built and maintained business-critical
Email us at: contactus@sieena.com or
Web platforms for small-to-medium
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businesses up through large multi-

www.sieena.com

Phone: (310) 455-6188 | Fax: (310) 564-0344

1901 Avenue of the Stars 2nd Floor; Los Angeles, California, 90067