Protobuild Case Study

Accelerance Client Case Study - Protobuild
January 7, 2005

Retail construction industry ready for automation

Industry experts in the late ‘90s realized that the Internet could provide huge savings in automating retail construction projects. Construction managers, general contractors and architects involved in the construction, renovation and maintenance of retail properties, had long managed projects with pencil and paper. Protobuild’s founders shared critical industry knowledge and knew that delays in retail construction projects not only caused expensive cost overruns, but also cost retailers hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost sales and marketing expenses when a store did not open on time. The founders’ envisioned a web-based Enterprise Program Management solution, which included budget, scheduling and document workflow features, to preserve precious margin and insure on-time and on-budget project completions.


The four founders knew their industry but were not experts in software development

Protobuild’s founders were experienced in the key functional areas required to build a strong company to create software for the retail construction industry, with the exception of technical and programming know-how. Between the four founders they had the contacts, recognized the problem and need for a web-based solution and could explain what the product should do. What they didn't have was the experience of specifying a product for development, nor managing the development process, nor hiring a development team. “When we started Protobuild, we had a lot of business ideas of what we wanted to do, but until we had a proof point and something to take to market for customers to validate, we couldn't take the next steps,” said Amaya.


Accelerance takes product from slide-ware to software as “prime contractor”

Protobuild needed a low cost way to develop a prototype product to customers for concept validation and to VCs for fund raising. “With Accelerance we had an expert who, with a team of outsourced developers, could develop the product from idea to prototype without our building the big structure of an IT department,” Amaya said.The Accelerance Outsourcing Prime Contractor service  provided the oversight role of “prime contractor” in developing the product - from the founders’ vision, to the Marketing Requirements Document, to the Product Development Plan, and to finished prototype. Accelerance completed the specification and implemented the system as a J2EE n-tier architecture with a RDBMS backend. Within four months, Accelerance and an outsourced development team from Russia had a beta version of the product ready for market validation. “Working with Accelerance accelerated the process. Accelerance reduced the cost in creating our proof of concept beta product and helped get our product out to market for validation at a much lower cost. Accelerance was instrumental in getting our product to market. Accelerance lowered the cost to develop our prototype by 50% and reduced the timeline by 50%,” Amaya said.

Unfortunately, the dot.com market crashed before funding was secured and Protobuild was unable to continue operations.