Case-Study: Business process automation via custom ERP system development

Client

The client is 24 Online - one of the largest Internet service providers in Finland.

Background

24 Online is a major service provider which has a lot of different equipment like routers, wires, switches, different channels etc. With time the amount of equipment as well as amount of clients have been growing and therefore customer decided to perform automation of such processes as registration of network equipment, registration of clients and their connection profiles, management and balancing of workload for installed equipment, invoicing and payments and several other.

This ERP system is planned to be a continuous development as far as there is a lot of processes to be included.

Solution

The main issue at the start of the project was absence of any formal requirements. Customer had just intension to automate its processes as well as basic ideas about the look & feel and functions which the system should have. To be able to build efficient and cost-effective system with high ROI, one representative of Qulix Systems performed visit to customer on site to communicate closely with technical experts and business people there and to create a vision on the system required. In the meantime 2 offsite analysts investigated existing systems in the same domain to extract useful ideas and approaches.

The project was planned by iterations. During first 2 iterations complete analysis and prototyping was done and agreed with customer. Also, a comprehensive set of documentation was prepared including project Vision, set of Business Use-Cases, SAD, SRS to allow development team efficiently proceed with implementation activities.

Key features

The system is mainly purposed for internal usage to monitor connections, system load, time spent in Internet etc. The following modules are the major ones:

• Equipment registration
• Monitoring and balancing of system load
• Monitoring of active connections
• Billing and payments

Technical overview

The ERP solution is a typical 3-tier web application based on J2EE platform and Spring framework. Three layers of the system are business logic, presentation layer and persistence (database) layer. Such division allowed independent work of design group and programmers in the project team. Graphical interface is presented via JSP pages with servlets on server-side. It was also decided to use ORM in the project (Hibernate) for object-based data access. The main project focus was to use open source technologies to cut licenses costs, so such tools as PostgreeSQL, Spring, Hibernate were used.

Monitoring mechanism was implemented on the basis of SNMP protocol with usage of third-party controls for graphs drawing.

Benefits for the customer

• Business value obtained through automation of in-house processes
• All customer business specifics is considered in the produced solution

Technologies and products used

J2EE platform: JSP, Servlets, Spring framework, Hibernate, PostgreSQL, Tomcat, IBM Rational ClearQuest, CVS, MS Project

Project workload

The project team for phase 1 comprised 4 people, and project duration was 8 months. Now phase 2 of the project is in progress and it was required to increase team size to 6 people.

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