At PAQT, we love to collaborate, both with co-workers and clients. That’s right: we work with them — not for them. Here’s why: building software is teamwork, and everyone makes valuable contributions. What do our close collaborations look like in practice? We’re happy to share that with you. And there’s no one better to explain it than our clients. Today, Bas Pardoel, managing director at recycling expert Recoll, shares how he’s experienced collaborating with PAQT. At the end of 2020, we developed a brand-new Laravel application for Recoll to streamline the collection and recycling of printer cartridges. The 10-year-old system needed to be replaced.
Search for a suitable partner
“We don’t have our own IT department,” says Bas. “So when we decided to renew our software, we set out to find a suitable partner. During our selection process, we noticed that PAQT focused on our business goals rather than technology. That was really refreshing. Ultimately, it’s what made us decide to work with PAQT.”
Ambitions
“We had a pretty clear idea of what we wanted,” Bas continues. “But in the initial phase, we quickly noticed there were more options than we’d thought. During our conversations with Maurits and the developers, we delved into our business processes, and I was triggered by certain questions. We identified many manual tasks that were easy to automate using a new application.
That’s how our ambition to simply renew an application evolved into the goal to innovate and automate our business processes. Sitting down with a team that contributes ideas creates a different type of energy. That really surprised me.”
A collaboration like this requires commitment from both sides.
The solution
“We use a closed-loop model: we collect, clean, refill, and sell empty cartridges. We do this at the European level. All these processes have been incorporated into the new application. The Laravel solution sits between our marketing websites and our ERP system. It connects these systems, as well as those of our suppliers and partners. This combination — in its entirety — provides a wealth of possibilities. While our previous system wasn’t scalable at all, this application is.”
Staying involved
“A collaboration like this requires commitment from both sides. The development team joined the process early on, so we jointly determined the ultimate goal. As a result, everyone was 100 percent committed. At the same time, I was also expected to constantly be involved. Every week, I visited PAQT to discuss progress and review points of interest. During the process, we regularly encountered practical issues. Sometimes, that meant we had to adjust our demands to stay on the right track.”
Further development
“After the application went live, we engaged in further development right away. We were in the middle of an acquisition process — a French party acquired us, and their ordering system had to be integrated into our application. The deadline was very strict, because the French system would permanently go offline. Not going live would directly impact our revenue. By being transparent with the team about the importance of the acquisition, there was a noticeable commitment to join forces and meet the deadline — despite it being such a huge task! Ultimately, we received the first orders through our application one day before the deadline.”
Long-term collaboration
“In the past, I worked on quite a few IT projects,” says Bas, “but PAQT’s working method differs from my previous experiences in many ways. The biggest differences lie in their transparent collaboration and full transparency in the process. I don’t think an ‘old-school’ approach would have brought us where we are today. Now, we have a great foundation we can build on with PAQT for a long time.”
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