Customer
An acknowledged innovator in private label PLM (product lifecycle management) from inception through design and manufacturing to disposal and food safety, the company powers retailers, manufacturers and suppliers in many countries.
Challenge
The Customer had an e-collaborative cloud-based platform to support the development of private label products and national brands. The platform helped all supply chain stakeholders benefit from faster communication, more accurate data, and transparency in their business. With the private label industry growing more competitive on the global stage, the Customer was offering online collaborative platforms to help supply chain stakeholders to successfully deliver new products to the market. As the leading provider of PLM software in Europe, the company aimed at merging with other industry players to consolidate competences, functionalities and clients, creating one of the world’s largest supply chain networks. Haus Consulting was chosen among other European software development vendors to help the Customer develop and integrate the existing solutions into a single collaborative resource for the global retail industry.
Solution
Haus Consulting's retail app development team of project manager, .NET developers and QA engineer kicked off cooperation with the Customer, launching a project to develop and support one of the PLM products acquired in the UK. The solution was designed to streamline the development of private label products for many manufacturers and large retailers by increasing their quality and security from start to finish. In the course of the project, Haus Consulting ramped up the team with .NET developers to meet the increased demand.
Following the subsequent acquisition of another PLM software company in France, the Customer commissioned Haus Consulting to perform full-cycle testing for both products. To help the company reduce the testing costs, Haus Consulting’s dedicated team came up with a test automation solution. It allowed building and running coded UI tests (automated tests of the user interface) for multiple solutions being customized for large retailers. At this point, the overall testing team size totaled 24 specialists.
With the growing number of global retailers joining the network, it was important to provide users with full analysis and reporting capabilities through an intuitive multilingual interface. Armed with MicroStrategy tools as well as years of experience in data analysis, Haus Consulting’s dedicated team of business intelligence (BI) developers and testers created a multilevel data warehouse (DWH) to aggregate the raw information from globally distributed databases.
After two years of cooperation, Haus Consulting’s team grew in number and finally involved specialists working for multiple projects together with international development groups.
Technologies and Tools
Frameworks & libraries: NET 4.0, ASP.NET (WebForms, MVC), Classic ASP, NHibernate, ADO.NET
Build and deployment: Windows PowerShell, WIX, CruiseControl.NET, TFS
Automated testing: Microsoft Coded UI Tests
Business intelligence (BI): MicroStrategy 9.2.1, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2, T-SQL