VP of Engineering on achieving engineering excellence
Interviewer: – taking the time to talk to us today, really appreciate it.
Eric Hensley: My pleasure.
Interviewer: Eric Hensley is the VP of engineering at Aravo Solutions, and he’s going to talk about his experience with Apexon from an engineering and a QA perspective. So I’ll dive into the first question. Briefly tell us about Aravo Solutions and also how it’s placed in the industry today.
Eric Hensley: Okay. Aravo Solutions is a SaaS company. We provide supplier information and supplier lifecycle management solutions to the industry. So our customers tend to be large Fortune 500 companies. They have complex supply chains.
And the problem that we solve is specifically around information about suppliers. It could be compliance information. It could be performance information. It could be information about risk. But, generally, these large companies traditionally don’t have a good solution for maintaining all of their information about their suppliers in one place and putting in place good processes for managing that information ongoing. We provide a SaaS solution to cover that gap.
Interviewer: Right, okay. So, as the VP of engineering, what are your key objectives from a QA and an engineering perspective?
Eric Hensley: So the key objectives from our product’s delivery point of view, which is really what we’re talking about, is to clearly cover our customers’ businesses cases with respect to those larger themes that I mentioned before.
But, in addition, when it comes specifically to how Apexon helps us, we have non-functional requirements and, of course, functional requirements that is key for our delivery, performance, scalability, consistency and on-time delivery, and the ability to maintain our application in a sort of consistently evolving business environment.
Interviewer: So you basically answered my third question. I was going to ask you: What functions does Apexon support you on? So I guess I get −
Eric Hensley: Absolutely. So Apexon supports all functions in my organization. They’ve been a close partner of ours for years. So I’m responsible for our product engineering, which is primary enhancements to our SaaS product, our sustaining engineering function, which is brake fix and tactical enhancements, quality, software quality, our support function, and the technical part of our implementations, which we call technical services. And Apexon helps me extensively in all of those areas.
Interviewer: Great.