Customer

The Customer offers an e-collaborative cloud-based platform to support the development of private label products and national brands. The platform helps all supply chain stakeholders benefit from faster communication, more accurate data, and transparency in their business. An acknowledged innovator in private label PLM (product lifecycle management) from inception through design and manufacturing to disposal and food safety, the company powers 20,000 retailers, manufacturers and suppliers in 110 countries. Among the Customer’s clients there are Tesco, Auchan, Carrefour Group, Coca-Cola, Danone, L’Oréal, Procter & Gamble and many others.

Challenge

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. ScienceSoft 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

ScienceSoft's retail app development team of 1 project manager, 2 .NET developers and 1 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 12,000 manufacturers and 32 large retailers by increasing their quality and security from start to finish. In the course of the project, ScienceSoft ramped up the team with 4 .NET developers to meet the increased demand.

Following the subsequent acquisition of another PLM software company in France, the Customer commissioned ScienceSoft to perform testing for both products. To help the company reduce the testing costs, ScienceSoft 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 11 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 23 years of experience in data analysis, ScienceSoft team of 7 business intelligence (BI) developers and testers created a multilevel data warehouse (DWH) to aggregate the raw information from 20 globally distributed databases.

After two years of cooperation, ScienceSoft team grew in number and finally involved 39 specialists working for multiple projects together with international development groups.

Results

Repeatedly recognized as the most innovative and fast-growing technology company in Europe, the Customer with the help of ScienceSoft delivered a unique platform that now drives the development of products with over $300 billion in annual sales.

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