FAQ (Frequently asked questions)
While working with Fidel, as a client you might have different questions regarding delivery or engagement models, payment cycles, practices, documentation and so on. Here we try to answer few questions beforehand:
- What are your engagement models?
- What is the time zone of your support?
- What kind of payment cycle do you accept?
- Do you have native Japanese team members in your team?
- How do you source project staff members?
- Do you work on small engagements as well as big engagements?
- Do you take only new development project or do you take operations support and maintenance kind of projects as well?
- If we have a client and we have the engineer, will you just support the payroll and visa for our engineer?
- Our clients wants to outsource the project but the initial requirement analysis or BA part needs to be done in Japan and we don’t have anyone there. Can Fidel support us?
- We have a small representative office of 10 people in Japan. We don’t have any in-house IT system administrator. We don’t need anyone full-time. Can Fidel help us?
- We want to outsource work to Fidel and get it done from India offshore. But we don’t know anything about India. Can you help us?
- Can Fidel provide nearshore services or within Japan services?
- What kind of services does Fidel provide in ServiceNow?
- Is ServiceNow used in Japan?
- What kind of data analytics work has Fidel done so far?
- What SAP modules has Fidel worked in?
- What kind of tools does Fidel use?
- Can Fidel do documentation in Japanese?
- Can Fidel work in waterfall as well as Agile project management methodologies?
- What kind of domains have you worked?
- Which languages do you handle?
- What are the overall services?
- Do you handle all Asian and Indian languages?
- Which CAT tools do you support?
- Do you also take MTPE projects?
- How many project managers do you have in Japan?
- Do you provide transcription and annotation services?
- What kind of payment schedule do you accept?
- Any particular domain that you work?
- Do you also take legal domain or medical domain work?
- Tell me more about the “Linguify” solution
Technology (Solutions and Services)
What are your engagement models?
Fidel works on 3 models –
- Fixed price turnkey project
- Time and material
- Dedicated delivery center approach
What is the time zone of your support?
Fidel Technologies works in Japan timezone – from Mon – Fri 9:00 am to 18:00 pm. For support purpose, we also have the flexibility to start the support or system health-check from 7:30 am onwards Or perform some support operations in late evening, for eg. in case there are batch process monitoring or some specific operations to be performed.
What kind of payment cycle do you accept?
Most of our engagements have a 30-45 payment cycle. We accept payments through bank payments, paypal and Payoneer.
Do you have native Japanese team members in your team?
Fidel has native Japanese team members for requirement gathering or project management as well as L1 support. We also have access to local bilingual foreigners proficient in Japanese and English. Fidel also has access to local partners and is a part of a healthy eco-system.
How do you source project staff members?
Fidel has in-house project manager, developers, BA, linguists. Besides this, it has a well-developed eco-system of partners, freelancers with whom Fidel has worked over the period. Fidel also has a group company Fidel Consulting (www.fidelconsulting.com) which specializes in temp staffing and permanent hires and hence has a huge database of pre-vetted prospect candidates. Lastly Fidel’s partner company in India has an in-house team of around 150+ members consisting of developers, testers, infra engineers, ServiceNow developers and linguists.
Do you work on small engagements as well as big engagements?
We work on small as well as big engagements. Depending on resource availability, we have worked on 2 man month projects as well as 170 man month projects.
Do you take only new development project or do you take operations support and maintenance kind of projects as well?
Fidel does take operations and maintenance kind of projects as well. Operations projects include network and infra monitoring, L1-L2 support, application support, batch process monitoring etc. Maintenance project include taking over maintenance of applications, operational support to users, bug fixing, new feature addition, reverse engineering of application and so on.
If we have a client and we have the engineer, will you just support the payroll and visa for our engineer?
Yes Fidel has worked in past with clients and supported them in their Japan logistics whereby Fidel assists in visa, payroll and local logistics support.
Our clients wants to outsource the project but the initial requirement analysis or BA part needs to be done in Japan and we don’t have anyone there. Can Fidel support us?
Yes Fidel has worked in past with clients and participated in the initial requirement gathering or BA phase representing the offshore vendor. Fidel assigns native Japanese or bilingual staff as per the requirement.
We have a small representative office of 10 people in Japan. We don’t have any in-house IT system administrator. We don’t need anyone full-time. Can Fidel help us?
Yes Fidel has worked with many clients in past, where Fidel IT Infra engineer visits such clients once in a week on a pre-decided day (say Wed) for 4 hours and resolves user issues, printer setups, PC connectivity issues, memory or harddisk replacement, procurement of hardware, liaison with 3rd party vendors on behalf of the client, coordinating with the parent office for rolling out or upgrading any application, O365 setup and so on. While the staff visits onsite once every week, he/she is also available on call with various engagement options.
Once the team size in the Japan office increases, then the client can shift to a direct regular in-house hire.
We want to outsource work to Fidel and get it done from India offshore. But we don’t know anything about India. Can you help us?
Fidel works with offshore center in Pune (India) which is 150 km off Mumbai (western India).
The India center has around 150+ team members with state of art infrastructure. There is UPS, generator backup with strong network of 3 ISP providers. There is physical security with visitor logs checked regularly. India center has ISO9001 (quality) as well as ISO27001 (ISMS/ITIL and data security) and hence a good awareness regarding quality and data security. Fidel regularly gets its projects done from offshore.
Can Fidel provide nearshore services or within Japan services?
Yes Fidel has provided services in Chiba, Yokohama, Kanagawa, Sendai, Okinawa, Fukui, Fukuoka and Nagoya in past. Fidel had formed small teams with a client focus at these locations with an idea of supporting in real-time and nearshore services provision.
What kind of services does Fidel provide in ServiceNow?
Fidel provides administration and configuration support services where Fidel manages the ServiceNow instance on behalf of client and provides administration. Then Fidel also does a gap analysis of the requirements and identifies the customization points. Fidel then provides customization. Lastly Fidel provides operational support and maintenance on an ongoing basis. The development and support can start from 100 hours per month in a small and flexible way.
Is ServiceNow used in Japan?
Yes ServiceNow is very much growing in Japan and many big and medium size companies use it for workflow management, ITIL, IT Services management, Asset management, Knowledge management and so on.
What kind of data analytics work has Fidel done so far?
Fidel has worked in data analytics area as per client requirements. In some projects, Fidel has participated in data identification, sorting and cleansing phase while in some cases, it has participated in the reporting phase using PowerBI and Tableau. Fidel has also dispatched data scientists onsite who work with clients to build an intelligent model suited to the metrics for their business.
What SAP modules has Fidel worked in?
Fidel has been providing resources in the areas of SAP SD MM, FICO & HANA. Fidel has not implemented an end-to-end project on its own but participated as a vendor or a partner in client projects in various phases like business requirement gathering, configuration and customization, maintenance and user training. Until 2023, there would be a huge requirement in SAP in Japan. SAP is widely used in manufacturing, retail and pharma industry in Japan.
Fidel has mentioned its core 5 areas of ServiceNow, Data Analytics, Virtualization, Digital Transformation and SAP.
What kind of tools does Fidel use?
Fidel uses standard tools for bug tracking / version control / task allocation etc. Tools include: GIT, JIRA, SVN, Mantis, Redmine, Maven, Slack Jibble etc.
Can Fidel do documentation in Japanese?
Yes Fidel has in-house bilingual Japanese members in Japan as well as in its India center. Fidel can adhere to client formats or can share its own templates. Fidel can provide the deliverables in Japanese language (requirement document, HLD, LLD, Test cases, Project management documents (plans, schedule, WBS etc) .
Can Fidel work in waterfall as well as Agile project management methodologies?
Yes Fidel has experience of both methodologies. Traditionally Japanese companies are used to waterfall method of development. Hence for legacy application modernization projects, testing projects etc, Fidel suggests waterfall development methodology. But for Product development as a Service (PDaaS), since product development needs speed and an iterative mechanism to incorporate regular user or stakeholder feedback, Fidel prefers or suggests Agile methodology.
What kind of domains have you worked?
Fidel has worked with retail industry clients (health oil provider, casual clothing provider), System integrator firms, Product firms, BFSI (banking, insurance, securities) clients and so on. In our engagement, Fidel requests the clients to provide domain expertise while Fidel brings in the technology and implementation expertise. Fidel assigns a BA (business analyst) to gather specification and build some domain understanding but since each client has specific business operations and workflows, Fidel encourages the clients to share the requirements and business practices.
Localization
Which languages do you handle?
Fidel handles 60+ languages primarily most Asian – ASEAN – South Asian – all Indian languages. While the major language pairs are English-Japanese, Japanese-English, Japanese-Chinese, Japanese-Korean, English-Hindi, English-Tamil, English-Marathi. Fidel covers a diverse set of languages and support client’s Asian market entry.
What are the overall services?
Translation, Website & Software localization, Transcription & Annotation, DTP, Video-subtitling for elearning or training videos or OTT videos, patent translations are services that Fidel offers to its clients.
Do you handle all Asian and Indian languages?
Fidel handles all Asian, ASEAN, South Asian and Indian languages. While Japanese (English-Japanese & Japanese-English) is the major language pairs, Fidel handles all Indian languages. Fidel also works on Sinhalese (SriLanka), Bengali(Bangladesh) and other South Asian languages as well as ASEAN (Vietnamese, Thai, Bahasa, Tagalog, Malay etc) languages.
Which CAT tools do you support?
Fidel aligns itself to the client tools and technologies. With an in-house technology team, Fidel can quickly adapt to the infrastructure requirements if any and train its team. Over the years, Fidel has worked on TRADOS, Memsource, Transit, SmartCAT, Prabhandak and other CAT tools.
Do you also take MTPE projects?
Fidel works on MTPE projects. Fidel discusses with clients and decide upon the expected quality and then works on various MTPE projects.
How many project managers do you have in Japan?
Fidel has 10+ in-house native Japanese bilingual project managers. Together with the help from the Project managers in the India office
Do you provide transcription and annotation services?
Fidel works with clients for transcription and annotation services. Clients need vernacular data for training chatbots or AI engines. This data is created and then transcribed and annotated as per the client rules and style guides. There is also image transcription whereby this annotated image data is then fed to AI engines of autonomous cars.
What kind of payment schedule do you accept?
Fidel typically has most clients paying in 30 -45 days.
Any particular domain that you work?
Fidel works in areas of IT, finance, engineering, manufacturing and metals etc. Due to its technology background, technical related work is more. Some marketing related work is also done by Fidel.
Do you also take legal domain or medical domain work?
Fidel works on contract translation but not much in legal domain. Further it works in healthcare, medical devices but not much in scientific papers or medical.
Tell me more about the “Linguify” solution
Linguify is a middleware solution that can localize the UI of any website or enterprise software in 6-8 weeks without the need to modify the underlying source code or contents. The scraping of contents from the screen and the real time switching of languages is the technology part while the translation itself is human translation and hence quality is assured. The solution is installed at client premise or client cloud and hence security and control is assured. Since the source code is not modified, it Is one of the most speedy and secure ways to localize.
Most banks (19+ banks ) in India, websites like MamyPoko (www.mamypoko.in) , Tata Capital (www.tatacapital.com ) and enterprise firms like Fujitsu, SAP, AutomationAnywhere are its clients for past few years.