Customer:

Itellium Services GmbH - IT supplier for German retail sector, formerly member of one of the biggest IT companies in the world.

Projects names:

• Price and Promotion Management, Mobida – management of prices and promotion both in the central and local shops , products labeling with bar codes,
• Inventory – control of goods deliveries, maintenance of stocks,
• Till - Point of Sale application supporting also non-cash payment methods and loyalty programs,
• Customer Order Process – implementation of special orders issues by customers together with the financing for them.

Technologies:

J2EE, J2ME, SWT, Struts, Oracle Application Server, Tomcat, Oracle Database, Starteam, jUnit ,Cruise Control, Model Driven Architecture (MDA), Unified Modeling Language (UML).

Project starting point description.

When we joined project in 2003 the biggest problems were:

• risk of not meeting the schedule and exceeding budget plans,
• significant costs related to adding new developers to the team and their little effectiveness due to different levels of technical experience and business domain knowledge,
• high costs of using selected frameworks were not compensated by gain of productivity,
• lack of common rules and solution patterns, caused diversity in implementation of solutions for the same class of problems and resulted in significant costs of code maintenance,
• obstacle for further development of the system, necessity of integrating many external services in modern ways.

Project tasks:

participation in creating a fully fledged system supporting processes related to handling business cases in warehouses and shops of Karstadt, analysis of the requirements, system design, development and application maintenance, moving the project into near shore and outsourcing model.

Consileons tasks:

• analysis of business processes, design of workflow for customer orders, creation of system specification, consulting on architecture, system design and documentation of the system,
• jointly with the customer preparation of requirements, co-design and further development of frameworks, being the core of system’s architecture, naming rules and design, programming, testing conventions, improving the quality of system implementation,
• development of web, batch and mobile device applications supporting portable devices, bar code scanners and label printers,
• integrating legacy technologies used in the core of the system with modern frameworks,
• moving the project into near shore model and then outsourcing: defining scope of tasks to move, naming the roles and responsibilities, defining rules of cooperation, communications paths between teams working in Germany and Poland, controlling the results of those processes.

Achievements:

• significant improvement of quality of source code and stability of the application, lowered application maintenance costs and shortening the delivery time for building and rolling out next releases of the system,
• on-time delivery of 1-2 releases of the system to 168 shops in the country with 20 000 users involved,
• effective change from on-site working model (in Essen) to nears shore (in Szczecin, Poznań and Gorzów Wielkopolski),
• successful integration of Polish and German teams,
• further development and roll outs of the systems for new customers – other retail brands from Germany, UK, South Africa,
• in 2006 project was awarded as 2nd in 'Best in Store Innovation' within the 'Global Retail Achievement Awards' contest.