SRM Software and Project Management Consulting to Speed Up Development and Optimize Costs

About Our Customer

The Customer is a US-based company rendering full-cycle supply chain services for the manufacturing industry. The organization’s digital supply chain management solutions are used by the world’s leading automotive, electronics, and electrical engineering companies such as Eaton, Honda, Schneider Electrics, Acuity Brands, Daimler, and BorgWarner.

Project Management Required Improvement to Ensure Effective Delivery

The Customer wanted to help its clients make supply chain processes more resilient to global challenges. The company decided to take its internal procurement and quality control solution to the market and turn it into a convenient digital platform for direct supplier-manufacturer cooperation. The platform was intended to provide three SaaS products in one dashboard: a supplier relationship management (SRM) system, an eSourcing solution, and a quality management tool.

The Customer needed project management support and wanted to speed up product launch thus decided to outsource the development of its SRM solution to a third-party IT vendor. To maximize the efficiency of vendor cooperation and accelerate the project flow, at a certain point, the Customer decided to involve professional consultants to audit its project, identify the areas of improvement, and assist with implementing project management best practices. ScienceSoft was chosen as a trustworthy tech partner with decades-long experience in IT consulting and 11 years of practice in supply chain software development.

SRM Software Development Project Audit and Consulting on Improvements

ScienceSoft provided the Customer with an experienced delivery manager and a solution architect to act as impartial project auditors. Our team explored the available technical and process documentation and interviewed the project stakeholders on the Customer’s side to elicit their requirements for the project flow. ScienceSoft’s experts also participated in the third-party vendor’s Agile processes, including daily Scrum meetings, to understand the company-vendor interaction specifics and assess the project pace.

Having analyzed the as-is project state, ScienceSoft’s delivery manager and architect documented the revealed project management and requirements gathering inefficiencies and offered pragmatic steps to address them. Our experts categorized the discovered issues according to their severity and prioritized the remediation steps based on their value for the Customer. Their advice spanned all critical project aspects and included:

• Setting clear financial KPIs to track the project budget utilization and investment payback.
• Creating a feature release schedule to better manage the backlog and progress for the planned features.
• Assigning individual task owners to clearly see and control role-specific responsibilities for the development flow.
• Measuring sprint velocity and reconsidering the sprint duration to avoid pipeline overloading with unfinished tasks.
• Persistently documenting the requirements to ensure the vendor understands the company’s needs and goals. It also helps facilitate the change approval flow.
• Obtaining the necessary testing documentation from the vendor to stay transparent of the quality assurance processes and outcomes.
• Integrating automated regression tests into the CI/CD pipeline to streamline releases and promptly spot and fix any arising issues.

SRM Software Architecture Review to Identify and Fix Potential Flaws

The accuracy of the SRM product’s technical design was among the key priorities for the Customer since the design issues could compromise product quality and lead to high maintenance costs. The company asked our architect to conduct an independent review of the SaaS SRM’s architecture and point out its weaknesses and possible problems.

ScienceSoft’s Azure expert thoroughly analyzed the SRM app’s infrastructure, the interactions between the software components and the external systems, the database structure, and data access points. He evaluated the solution’s architecture design in terms of maintainability, security, and performance. Following the review, our architect provided a comprehensive audit report describing the revealed architectural pain points and their potential operational and financial impact. The Customer also received detailed guidelines on how to improve the architecture to achieve enhanced system stability, better data protection, and optimized product maintenance costs.

Development Process Improvement to Speed Up the SRM Product Launch and Optimize Costs

Within 10 weeks, ScienceSoft performed an in-depth SRM software development project audit and prepared a comprehensive report on the SRM’s architecture issues and their potential impact. ScienceSoft’s expert advice on project management improvements helped the Customer speed up the SRM product launch and minimize the risks due to more efficient development processes, fixed collaboration and communication flows, and better control over the project's progress. Thanks to the architecture review and consulting on enhancements provided by ScienceSoft’s experts, the Customer got the possibility to prevent the SRM app’s performance and security issues and reduce maintenance costs.

Technologies and Tools

Azure Cloud, Azure DevOps, Confluence, Draw.io, Microsoft Teams.