Maintenance and development of a corporate system of support of sales

Task

The support system of sales of MARS (Mobile Automated Retail Sales) created by the center of development of Procter&Gamble company is used in all representations Procter&Gamble in Central Europe, on the Middle East and in Africa (CEEMEA region) for automation of small wholesale sales of products Procter&Gamble by means of mini-vans now. A front office part of a system is implemented based on portable PALM platforms and provides sales representatives with all set of the opportunities necessary for effective work, such as support of functionality of the terminal of sales, instant printing of legal documents, report generation, etc.

Use of the solution in the territory of Russia and Ukraine required completion of the solution which assumed localization elements and also implementation of a number of special functionality. Based on competitive selection in November, 2002 by the partner for accomplishment of this project selected Aplana company. In addition to such criteria as project implementation terms, quality and the price, the important role when choosing the contractor was played by Aplan's experience in the field of support of corporate applications: since 1999 specialists of the company render services in development of support system of sales for one of General Electric business divisions and also conduct some more whole projects of a similar profile.

Solution

Within the long-term project on maintenance of the system of mobile sales used by sales representatives Procter&Gamble in Russia and Ukraine the regular release of new versions of a system and user support of a system on a hot line is performed.

For project management the specialized means of Microsoft and IBM Rational providing planning processes, configuration management, change management were used. "The project success, connected with making changes in others program code, in many respects is defined by use of the correct methodology of maintaining projects and also readiness of the customer to formalize the processes connected with the organization of interaction. In this project both requirements were fulfilled that allowed to make it transparent and managed and also to provide effective interaction in the project. For example, end users had an opportunity to place error messages and wishes on completion of a system directly in the database of changes on the server Aplana that allowed to reduce significantly both terms of "running in" of new versions, and a response time by separate requests," - Macedon Mihail, the chief executive Aplana comments.

Result

Support of corporate applications is one of the most demanded directions in the field of outsourcing of program services in Russia advancing development of new applications in popularity today. Maintenance services of program systems making changes in already implemented modules, integration into corporate applications, porting on more productive platform, etc. assume the solution of such tasks as implementation of new opportunities in a system. Transfer of similar tasks to external suppliers of services gives the chance to specialists of information service to pay more attention to a business component of information systems, to manage flexibly the project budget and also to formalize development of the application that allows to reduce dependence on specific developers considerably.

Parched Andrey, the head of group of information technologies on business development of the Russian office Procter&Gamble, noted: "We make and we sell consumer goods, and development and support of program systems – not our profile. And though we support a number of corporate systems, we do not try to do all and many tasks we transfer to an autosorsing to the external companies which specialize in the field. We expect high-quality support from the contractor, and Aplan's specialists managed to provide it, having provided development of a system within the existing technology".