The Client

The client is a finance service provider in UK, who is professional in providing investment advice and fundamental strategy to the world's leading money-centre banks such as Citigroup, Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, CIBC, Wells Fargo and others, focusing on foreign exchange, stocks and interest rate derivatives. Our customer possesses a team of finance analyst and IT technicians, who has successfully developed a set of online currency analysis software.

What the client wanted

There existed large-scale and complicated real-time foreign exchange analysis system in the company which was developed on the basis of Java and Solaris UNIX platform; it can query data from world famous currency trade markets. The system was able to intuitively present the track and trend of the market movement in the form of graph gained from the complete and accurate history & real-time market data utilizing the most mature economics theory and technical analysis tools currently.

Approach

For the system is complicated and large, schedule is tight, and documentation is relatively separated, the customer and we both believe the best way is to assign an on-site consultant to conduct knowledge transfer, as comparing with offshore service, the efficiency and accuracy of onsite knowledge transfer is outstandingly high.

During the process of on-site knowledge transfer, our consultant divides the whole system into seven modules, prepares each module in advance every day, and submits confirmations or questions about the system after each day of training. The whole on-site knowledge transfer lasts for about two weeks.

After the training, our team quickly and smoothly took over the system and set up an Offshore Development Center (ODC) for the client in charge of the whole system's maintenance, functional enhancement and customer support work

Throughout the whole process, we kept effective communication with the client as well as kept close watch on any change or issue that might impact the system and handled it promptly and effectively. The daily reports and related documents were provided to keep the client updated with the development process.

The Client

The client is an American leading provider of wireless communication solutions to enterprises, online businesses, media companies and individuals. It specializes in enabling businesses of any size to use wireless technology for text messaging, interactive communication and exchange.

What the client wanted

For its business expanding needs, the client turned to us for assistance in upgrade of its existing applications and development of new applications. According to the specifications at regular intervals, we were required to provide development work on the new functions of its products and the web interfaces were modified accordingly for offering its customers more convenience and efficient services.

Approach

According to the clients technical requirement, we provided two dedicated C++ experts with over two years wireless communication development experience to participate in the development.

With two weeks of trial development work, our developers approved their capability by a no bug delivery and satisfied the client very much. A long term development partnership was established.

During the following long term cooperation, our developers communicated with the client directly by email, instant messenger, or telephone to provide prompt response as if they were working next to the clients team. The client could easily control the schedule of the development and kept track of the development progress by regular project meeting, daily working reports and web-based project management tools.

C++ was used as the programming language and the technology of ATL, COM, MTS, XML, JavaScript and ASP was adopted in the development. The database was SQL Server.

Benefits

• Extension of engineering facilities was provided to the client.
• Excellent communication skills and mutual collaboration made the problems solving process quickly and smoothly.
• A repeatable, effective software development methodology ensured high quality of the development work.
• The development schedule was strictly controlled by the client to guarantee the delivery time.
• The development costs were slashed.

The project

Industry: tourism
Solution: enterprise management & e-Commerce
People involved: 6
Duration: 3 years
Our responsibilities:project management, resources management, deliverables management, technical support

The client

This is a US leading software service provider.

What the client wanted

The client had lots of software development work, and looked for a services supplier which could provide stable team with strong management and technology capability to obtain the highest cost efficiency.

The system was required to manage resort activities such as spa, class, events, rentals, transportation and childcare, as well as manage staff and materials etc. It would be a best-of-breed, middle tier activities management system, fully integrated with their existing suite of products and interfaced to leading POS and Property Management System.

Business challenges

The system had very complex business logic - Diversity business led to hundreds of files for the requirement with over 100 models and 11 different authorization roles required.

Solution

Having analyzed the client's situation and requirements, we selected the most suitable team that have years'of experience in enterprise management & e-Commerce development, and established an offshore development center for the client to satisfy the continuous software development needs.

In the initial phase of software development, the project manager and software architect worked with the client to identify the core business process, evaluate the requirement provided by the client to learn whether it was the best way to solve the business problems, and how technology could help to maximize the investment.In this phase, we focused on grasping the core requirement in the business problem domain to make initial estimation and plan, but not define all the requirements, to avoid frequent requirement changes. In the following elaboration phase, the whole requirements were gradually outlined and mutually acknowledged.

We strongly believe that free and open communication is the fundamental to the success of any outsourcing practices. When we wrestled with technical problems, we worked with the client, searching for the resolvent but not keeping them back. Quick response and quick execution to the client's requirement is also important, managers of the client organization no longer worry about making a wrong decision because they lack access to information.

Refactoring, which was always happen during the project development, is another strong weapon of us. From the code to the whole system architecture, we performed refactoring to mostly optimize the system.

In this project, Smart Client and BPEL were introduced to the development. The user-side windows forms-based Smart Client improves system response and error checking for user data entry. And the new Smart Client architecture is better on bandwidth. Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS) provides an XML-based process definition and execution language that enables the description of rich business processes without code changing.

Benefits

• The early visible progress was available to the customer.
• Quick response and quick execution to the emergent requirement.
• Capability and flexibility to vast business needs.
• The system's clear and compact architecture reduced maintenance costs.
• High risks were mitigated in the early phase due to the iterative development adopted.

The client

The client is an on-demand CRM product provider aims at helping its customers improving their business performance through CRM system.

Situation

Firstly, The Client required us to develop the general CRM system which has the main function models of Account, Count, Opportunity , Activity, Service, Campaigns.

As the client's customers are from different industries and they may have their own special needs, the emphasis on the CRM system functionality varies for different users from sales of automobile and accessory, client archives etc. Then after the product successfully completed, our team was required to customize the CRM system to fit the exact needs of different end users.

Solution

We set up an Offshore Development Center (ODC) for the client and chose a project manager who has rich experience in offshore development management.

Firstly an in-depth analysis of the requirements was made which enabled us to make an initial estimation and plan of the whole process. Then the project was kicked off based on SharePoint as the client required and used SharePoint Portal Server as project management tools. However, with the development of the project, SharePoint was not competent for the more and more operations. We recommended migrating the system from SharePoint to WinForm application. With the client's agreement, Service-Oriented Architecture and Smart Client were applied to complete the project.

As far as database was concerned, SQL server 2000 was used to deal with the large number of data required by the CRM system. With C/S structure, back-end data-exchange could be implemented by using web service. Offline Application block and the Clickonce were introduced to the development with which the offline editing functionality was realized.

In the customization phase, SourceSafe were used to assure the effectiveness of the project management. We focused on distinguishing the differences between requirements for different industries, even tiny changes. We made performance enhancement of the function modules like customer management, vehicle management, organization management and lease management according to features of each industry. We also created featured and professional GUI for different users.

During the cooperation, we always kept transparent and sufficient communication with our client. This enabled us to get client's feedback quickly and keep deep understanding of the core requirements. With the long time cooperation and the knowledge retention, we continuously improved the efficiency and decreased the development time.

Features

• With the mature model of ODC, sufficient communication and continuously improved efficiency were guaranteed. Our agile troubleshooting response and quick enhancement enabled the client to rapidly enhance its business competitiveness.
• During the cooperation, we provided specific suggestions with more appropriate technology that can better realize the functionality of the system and be able to scale and customize more effectively.
• From the beginning of this project, the client has been cooperated with us for nearly three years, since we always sent through new release of the product with high quality on schedule. We have built long-term partnership with deep trust.