Reliability, Scalability, and Competitiveness of a SaaS ERP Improved in 9 Months

Customer

The Customer is a Finnish company specializing in scientific and technological services and offering enterprise resource planning solutions, data processing applications, wireless communication systems and more.

Challenge

The Customer needed to revamp one of their projects – an online ERP system (written in PHP) which was poorly developed and thus could not hit the market. As a distributed SaaS application available for multiple users, the tool had to be flexible and scalable enough to satisfy the growing number of companies across various industries. ScienceSoft was chosen to breathe life into the software by revising its codebase and creating new features.

Solution

As the system was designed to streamline business processes, ScienceSoft developed two key modules to help stakeholders track and share resources:

• Job sharing: buyers can create projects or tasks and inform potential sellers (suppliers or subcontractors) that particular resources are needed to perform the task. It is also possible to contact a certain seller to request the required resources.
• Resource sharing: similarly, sellers can offer their assets to those interested or sign for the whole project.

In both cases, users provide the cost estimate, and the payment is processed through invoices upon the project completion. The progress visibility is achieved by means of step by step reporting. For better communication, the system allows users to exchange documents and messages.

To ensure that the application ran smoothly, ScienceSoft’s dedicated team (3 manual testers, 1 Senior QA Engineer as Team Lead and 2 Test Automation Engineers) covered over one third of 500 system functions with thorough test scripts written on Java from scratch. The test cases were continuously added to the testing server and ran automatically, on demand or when triggered by the pre-defined system events.

Teamed up with the testers, ScienceSoft’s developers fixed 800 bugs, making the system run like it was intended. The implemented solution made the system reliable and allowed to add new functionality

The project also involved QA consulting elements: the Team Lead set up a smooth and efficient testing process and supervised the in-team cooperation.

Results

The project was successfully finished in 9 months. In addition to that, ScienceSoft created a mobile time-tracking app which helped boost the Customer’s sales significantly. Integrated with the ERP system, the tool enabled employees to use their mobile phones for logging the time spent on a task within a particular project.

Technologies and Tools

PHP 5.5, Apache HTTP Server Version 2.0, Symfony 2, Doctrine 2, MySQL 5.5, HTML, CSS, jQuery, PHPunit, Twig