CUSTOMER SITUATION

Mexicana de Lubrecantes (MDL) is the largest motor oil distributor in Mexico. Headquartered in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, the firm has two production facilities located in Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco, and Tultitlán, Estado de Mexico. The firm’s marketing effort is national and international, reaching Mexico, Central and South America, plus Sweden.
When Unosquare began its engagement with MDL, the firm had an assortment of applications developed by another consulting firm and in-house resources. Several of these applications were put into the hands of its distributors which added technical support requirements for the firm. The firm had no central code repository and no source code control procedures.
MDL’s initial need was to update its web presence to support marketing activities. That was followed with extranet capabilities to better integrate marketing and sales with its distribution channel. That was followed with a series of software development and support activities of increasing sophistication, as well as a comprehensive assessment of MDL’s IT infrastructure.

WHAT UNOSQUARE DID

At the beginning of the engagement in 2004, Unosquare staff and project management worked directly with MDL’s marketing department and had little interaction with the IT staff. The website was developed to MDL’s specification. The project went smoothly and MDL was happy with the result, said Mario Di Vece, Chief Technology Officer of Unosquare.
With that project successfully completed, Unosquare was asked to develop an extranet to better integrate distributors, dealers and its entire sales channel. The extranet enables the sales channel to access price lists and to order promotional or sales material.
The first two projects were LAMP-based applications. The LAMP acronym references “L” for Linux, “A” for an Apache web server, M for MySQL, and “P” for PHP. Subsequent Unosquare development projects for MDL shifted to a WAMP architecture, where Windows replaced Linux for the underlying operating system.
At this point the MDL-Unosquare engagement began to shift incrementally, project-by-project, but Unosquare now began supporting and developing MDL’s core business applications.
First, MDL handed off a Visual Basic 6 (VB6) application for distributors. The application supported invoicing, credit reporting, and “anything that an accounting system would do”, Di Vece said, but in a distributed environment.
This application was originally developed by another consulting firm. MDL considered it legacy code that needed to be maintained, but they did not want to invest a lot to rewrite the application.
Unosquare now provides level 3 supports for this application, which is low-level support, and may include changes to the Visual Basic code of the application to fix problems. This particular application is provided by MDL to its distributors. If a distributor reports a problem to MDL, Unosquare will investigate the report and make the necessary changes.
Since taking over support for the application Unosquare has updated the application with bug fixes and added new reports.
About one year into Unosquare’s engagement with MDL, the company wanted to significantly update an important application that essentially supervised the entire operation. By this time, Di Vece said, Unosquare was well acquainted with MDL’s business and had solid relationships with the firm’s employees.
This analytical web-based application contained all the invoices and enabled data analysis in a variety of ways. Sales can be parsed, among other things, by sector, sales person, and branch. The application also determined the bonuses to be paid to distributors based upon their sales volume.
Next on tap was a new analytical services application for executive data mining. Unosquare implemented Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) cube data structures to more efficiently process large amounts of data along multiple dimensions and using a variety or data measures. The ability to “slice and dice data across several dimension” makes it far easier to visualize and report trends, Di Vece said.
For instance, if an executive wanted to see sales volume by region for the first half of 2010, the data measure would be sales volume and the dimensions would be region and date.
MDL then began to give Unosquare more and more programs and utilities to update or completely rewrite.

An important development project in progress is an electronic invoicing application for its distributors. Di Vece said these applications are very sensitive and highly regulated in Mexico. “We are working with encryption, certificates, content digests, and content signing”, everything necessary to meet national standards, he said.

RESULTS

Unosquare now has ten ongoing projects with MDL. Nine are providing level 3 support for development work that has been completed and a tenth is the electronic invoicing effort. During the course of the engagement, Unosquare’s work evolved from peripheral projects to revamping MDL’s core IT infrastructure. MDL has now outsourced all of its IT development and support to Unosquare.
At that point Unosquare took a comprehensive look at the MDL’s IT infrastructure. There was no central code repository and no source code control procedures. Change control tracking services were added as value-added service. All the source code is hosted by Unosquare with strict check-out and check-in procedures.
Unosquare also added issue management services as a value-added service. This provided MDL with full visibility of every hour worked on each issue or project. Issues are submitted and documented. Every two weeks MDL gets a comprehensive report of all outstanding issues, completed issues, and hours spent by issue.
A side-effect of the fairly casual IT environment at MDL was that, as their customer and distributor base grew, the performance of some MDL applications were degrading. Unosquare’s solution was to move the data and applications from MDL servers to servers within secure data centers. Unosquare migrated four of their customer applications and the results were very positive, Di Vece said. There were no more lags in performance and the number of simultaneous users per application was significantly increased.

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Unosquare, with offices in Portland, Oregon, and Guadalajara, Mexico, assisted an
Atlanta-based $400 million healthcare services and technology firm in revamping its
procedures and IT development processes. Unosquare helped to deliver greater quality
and reduce the client’s IT costs. The client delivers products and services for hospitals
and healthcare systems throughout North America.

Prior to contracting with Unosquare, the firm’s development staff was also responsible
for software testing. Their focus was on unit testing, which examines the functionality of
discrete portions of a software program without assessing how changes made in a
specific module might effect other modules, or the larger program.
Many argue that unit testing can be time-consuming and tedious. It demands the
development team be thorough and meticulously document their work. It is difficult for
unit testing to account for every input scenario that may occur when the program is run
in a real-world environment.

This is especially true when there is no automated quality assurance (QA) testing, a QA
team separate from the software engineers, or a QA testing environment for new
releases that is separate from production source code.
For this client, the result was end-users were experiencing too many problems during
normal product use. And instead of focusing on developing new features, the client’s
development team was spending valuable time pushing out software patches for
discrete glitches.

Source code control was also a problem. This is magnified when the QA process
focuses on unit testing. One developer would make a change and test that change in
the code base, but that change might negatively affect changes made by another
developer in the same environment. There was no process or documentation to control
the development and release of new features.

According to Mario Di Vece, Unosquare’s Chief Technology Officer, Unosquare
responded with three initiatives; an analytical system for pharmaceutical products, a
system to categorize products sold in the healthcare market, and an independent quality
assurance regime for software development. The key, however, was providing greater
discipline to software development and deployment.

“We established a consistent, agile, development process in which we could plan and
work through the features that needed to be addressed. We had meetings three to four
times a week so that everybody was in sync with what we were doing,” Di Vece said.
Unosquare established a process where the client could see a preview of the project
each week. If there was some feature or functionality, discussed previously, that was
not there, or needed to be changed, the client could identify it early and Unosquare
could address the matter, Di Vece noted.

“This dramatically reduced the client’s workload because they did not have to produce
detailed specifications, for the most part,” Di Vece said. “We can talk informally and then
we will break that down into a set of work items in the proper format. And we keep the
client informed and process their feedback every step of the way. We save them time.
We save them effort. We document everything. And we get feedback immediately,” he
said.

Unosquare also ensures the software systems work properly. “If they do not pass
quality assurance tests, then new software is not released,” Di Vece said.

The second project, called Product Data Utility, classifies all the products purchased by
hospitals or any other health care facility. Hundreds of variables are analyzed for
millions of line items. And many proprietary byproducts of that analysis are recorded.
All of the elements of the analytical system project were applied here as well, Di Vece
said. “We are using our source code control tools, our project management tools, and
our issue tracking tools as value-added services, providing full visibility to our client,” he
said.
The third project was to set up a dedicated quality assurance team. A major distinction
in this effort is that Unosquare employs the client’s systems and procedures.
“We seamlessly integrate and use their source code control tools, their project
management tools, their issue tracking tools, and their time tracking tools,” Di Vece
said. “In this since, we have been very successful in adapting to the client’s needs,” he
said.

Moreover, the QA testing for any software release was done with “frozen” code. With
the development team and the QA team being completely separate, one function did not
bleed over into the other. That increases the control and reliability over the testing
process.

The cost of setting up and training a dedicated QA team was reduced by 40% by
utilizing Unosquare’s Mexico-based team.
Defects are now being caught by the QA team, tracked by the version reports, and
logged within the tracking tool. All this came together as a well defined QA process
within each software version. It also greatly reduces the chances that a customer will
see a bug in production software

Unosquare continues to test client code in a more stable environment - not the
development environment – with frozen code, thereby reporting only viable defects.

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