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A leading retail food chain implemented a major revision to their Integrated Logistics System (ILS) suite of applications to reduce its support/maintenance/enhancement costs with a single-vendor solution comprising far fewer resources. It was also looking to scale up the supply chain environment aggressively to greater than 10,000 restaurants and 30+ distribution centers from the 3000 within a year following which the ILS would be decommissioned. Alliance provided comprehensive services and achieved objectives in the short and long term engagement to complete client satisfaction. Client has now retained Alliance for its new plans under a new entity.
Business Challenge:
- Applications comprising production environment were performing poorly, and were predominantly unstable
- Support resources were only marginally knowledgeable of the production applications
- Extremely large backlog of work orders, with a high volume of new work orders daily
- IT organization did not have service level commitments to supporting their technology
- Applications supporting the supply chain were poorly written, with little consideration for support requirements
- Few formal support procedures in place, and dangerously low cross-application expertise
RIGHTLINE Approach:
- Assessed client’s technical and functional environment
- Designed a solution that would meet the ongoing needs of ILS support, maintenance and development
- Initiated a long term project to “harden” the applications comprising the supply chain suite – resulting in unprecedented levels of stability and consistency in technology delivery. (“PAR”)
- Planned and executed detailed knowledge transfer and transition plans to ensure knowledge held by incumbent resources was successfully gained by the Alliance team prior to their incumbent departure
- Hardening activities and continuous, proactive support measures reduced the ticket volumes for new work order logged from 170+/week to less than 20/week on a consistent/continuing basis
- Established technology, management and administrative service level goals, and then delivered in excess of 99%-compliance to those goals over the course of 4 years
- Redesigned, re-wrote and performance-tuned key applications throughout the ILS batch processing schedules, many times reducing double-digit-hour executions to single-digit-minute executions. In addition designed and deployed an ILS-wide notification subsystem that is the key to supportability.
- Comprehensive support procedures/processes were established and executed consistently. Redundant coverage strategy deployed is a key to our success.
Business Value:
- Allaince demonstrated/proven/current support & maintenance, project management, and knowledge transfer methodologies and competencies, along with an approach for measuring quality of service (SLA).
- Used appropriate by mapping role competencies, people with educational and work experience in the required technologies, an approach for training and retaining professionals, and an approach for succession planning
- Added value through our knowledge and understanding of client’s fundamental business concepts, experience with the supply chain vertical industry, ability to work within client’s established culture, ability to establish effective relationships with 3rd party vendors.
- Kept cost under check for client with competitive, fixed pricing model for standard services, and ala cart for specialty services – all linked to service level agreements / measurements – all with the flexibility to meet changing staffing level demands.
- Responsiveness, commitment to meeting short & long term objectives, end-user satisfaction, and references from a similar engagement.
- Established all formal production support procedures which are in place today.
- Made significant contributions to the development of the PMO for the Supply Chain organization.
- Introduced new Implementation Methodology – delivering new/enhanced functionality to the ILS suite every ~30 days to match their promotional product lifecycle.
- Performed technical and project management services needed to successfully execute two (2) data center relocations. Exodus-to-IBM (physical relocation of existing infrastructure) and IBM-to-ACS (acquisition of new infrastructure at the target center).
- Conceived, designed and implemented knowledge repository and suite of tools that serve as our foundation for support coverage.
- Introduced Global Delivery capabilities to client by developing its Quality organization’s Stock Recovery application utilizing a “hybrid” onsite/offshore team approach.
- A measure of client confidence was that the client never called for competitive bids for services performed by Alliance throughout the 4 ½ years of this engagement.
- Implemented 30+ Business Releases over the course of 4 ½ years – each containing one-to-many Change Requests – all on-time, all within the SLA goal for software quality, and all without negatively affecting the overall stability of the production environment.
Alliance’s Redundant Coverage model:
- Establishing new baseline expectations for support responsiveness
- Ensuring all components of the ILS application suite are fully supported (risk mitigation)
- Ensuring that development commitments can be made without impacting support delivery quality
- Ensuring all procedures are focused on SLA performance, with backup procedures in place
- Effectively managing resource attrition with little or no impact on the business
- Gross Margin performance throughout the engagement to be 40%+
Contact Us:
Contact Us today to speak to a Practice Leader who can discuss how Alliance's Application Maintenance and Support Services teams can help you.
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