SaaS QMS for a Global Provider of Digital Supply Chain Management Solutions

Summary

ScienceSoft re-engineered and extended the functionality of a proprietary quality management system (QMS), turning it into a highly competitive multi-tenant SaaS solution running on Azure. We launched an MVP in just 3 months and a full version in less than 7 months.

About the Customer

The Customer is a UK-based provider of end-to-end sourcing and supply chain services to major manufacturing companies. The company helps businesses find suitable overseas manufacturing sources, track production quality, and manage all aspects of the transportation process.

To generate a new source of revenue, the Customer wanted to transform its well-performing internal procurement and quality control solutions into a digital platform that combines three SaaS products in one dashboard: an eSourcing solution, a quality management system, and a supplier relationship management (SRM) system.

The Customer was established as a dedicated business entity to manage the development and commercial distribution of the platform. Its in-house IT team created a prototype for the QMS product but lacked the relevant competencies to turn it into a full-featured solution. Owing to ScienceSoft’s expertise in SaaS planning and development, the Customer trusted us to rework the prototype into a full-scale QMS SaaS.

Analyzing the Legacy QMS and Planning a New SaaS Product

ScienceSoft assembled a project team comprising a project manager, a business analyst, a solution architect, a technical lead, 3 front-end developers, 3 .NET developers, and 4 QA engineers.

SaaS QMS design and planning

There was no up-to-date documentation for the legacy QMS architecture or functionality. ScienceSoft’s experts started with business analysis and requirements re-engineering to reproduce the functionality of the legacy QMS and plan the new app features.

In particular, ScienceSoft’s team:

• Conducted multiple interviews with the Product Owner and held knowledge transfer sessions with the development team of the legacy QMS.
• Explored the application’s use cases and existing workflows.
• Analyzed the integrations of the legacy QMS with the other corporate systems.
• Defined the potential SaaS users and analyzed the needs of different user groups.

Based on the research results, ScienceSoft’s business analyst elicited detailed functional and non-functional requirements for the solution-to-be and prioritized them for implementation.

ScienceSoft’s solution architect prepared the architecture design and an optimal tech stack for SaaS development, hosting, and management.

Re-engineering the QMS prototype into a full-scale QMS SaaS

ScienceSoft’s development team investigated and audited the code of the QMS prototype created by the Customer’s in-house team. The input from the initial developers was limited, so code investigation was the primary way to understand the solution prototype.

As a result of the code audit, ScienceSoft’s team produced a detailed report addressing the code quality and architecture issues. To clean the code, ScienceSoft’s team performed large-scale refactoring. It improved code readability, maintainability, and consistency with coding standards, making it possible to safely reuse the prototype code in the full-scale SaaS.

ScienceSoft designed a multi-tenant SaaS system running on Azure. It consists of an Angular.js single-page application and an ASP.NET-based back end. Azure SQL Database is used for storing structured data, Azure Blob Storage — for unstructured data, Azure Monitor — for collecting the infrastructure performance metrics, and Azure Application Insights — for the application logs and metrics.

The initial prototype already included UI mockups, so ScienceSoft’s team transformed them into a fully functional client side and ensured its communication with the server.

Relying on our mature Agile and DevOps cultures, the team worked in smooth biweekly Scrum cycles. The SaaS MVP was ready in 3 months, and the full version of the product was released within 7 months.

The new SaaS app enables its end users (companies that outsource manufacturing) to:

• Create custom quality assurance processes in the form of guided workflows. All workflows and forms are highly configurable: users can change quality attributes, required documents, approvals of documents and workflows, and much more.
• Quickly create new projects using templates (reusable project blueprints) based on predefined quality management processes.
• Report, view, and track production progress and quality incidents.
• Set up workflow notifications via email.
• Store all the documentation associated with a product and its quality records in one central location.

Results

Within three months, ScienceSoft delivered a sleek, market-ready MVP of a SaaS QMS. And in just seven months, we rolled out the full-blown version of a SaaS product with complex functionality. We applied best Agile and DevOps practices to ensure the development process was transparent and any risks were minimized.

Also, we organized knowledge transfer to the Customer's in-house maintenance team and ensured they were ready to keep the product performing at its best.

Technologies

ASP.NET, Angular.js, Azure SQL Database, Azure Blob Storage, Azure Monitor, Azure Application Insights.