Valdero Overview: Valdero Corporation (www.valdero.com) is a leading provider of enterprise class software solutions for Real-Time Supply and Demand Chain Execution. Valdero creates high velocity supply and demand chains through real-time visibility, collaboration, and execution. With Valdero, businesses can shorten order cycle times, minimize inventory, and reduce shortages. Valdero’s solution can be implemented in as little as three months.

Valdero Customers: Applicable across manufacturing companies in the high technology, medical and consumer markets, Valdero is currently in use at industry-leading companies such as Advanced Fibre Communications, Extreme Networks, Juniper Networks, Motorola, Leap Frog, and net.com.

Development Environment: J2EE, Java User Interface (Swing, Struts, Barracuda), EJB, Castor JDO, Jchart, log4j, Jive, Flux, XML Schema, Oracle, WebLogic, Jboss, Junit, HTTP Unit, Ant, Cruise Control, Mercury Test Director, Silk, Perforce.

Type of Service provided by CIStems: Extended Offshore Engineering Team providing Development and Quality Assurance Services. The team is dedicated to Valdero.

Nature of Billing: Monthly billing for the extended engineering team based on blended person hour rate. There is a cap on the maximum number of hours that can be billed for an engineer in a month.

Duration: Ongoing since Nov 2002

Peak Team Size: 14 and growing.

Distributed Workspace: VPN, Shared source code repository using Perforce, and Mercury Test Director.

Exchange Visits: Short exchange visits of one to two weeks were encouraged for the onshore and offshore team to improve coordination and integration.

Engagement Overview:

• Managing Director and VP Engineering of CIStems visited Valdero in Oct 2002 for one week to understand the functionality of the system, architecture, engineering process, and immediate needs for outsourcing.
  
  
• Started with a team of three developers in November 2002.
  
  
• First step was to set up the development environment for the offshore team, which included- VPN connectivity, access to Perforce and Mercury Test Director, synchronizing the code on developer workstations, running local build, and local deployment of the system.
  
  
• Initial set of tasks for the developers was to fix some of the bugs, which gave the opportunity to developers to understand the design and the code.
  
  
• The next set of tasks involved implementing enhancements for the existing functionality.
  
  
• QA team of 2 persons, and one more developer was added in February 2003.
  
  
• A complete new Replenishment module was developed by the offshore team from March 2003 to July 2003.
  
  
• The development team is fully integrated with the onshore team in US; and there is common iteration plan for the onshore and offshore team. Each iteration consists of 3 weeks. There is practically no distinction in terms of the tasks assigned to the onshore and offshore team, both the teams collaborate on fixing bugs, developing enhancements for existing functionality, and developing new functionality.
  
  
• The QA work is now handled entirely by the offshore team; except for the QA manager who is located onshore. The QA team develops manual test cases, automated test cases using in house tool developed by Valdero, as well as automated scripts using Silk. The QA team also executes the manual and automated test cases; and defects are tracked on Mercury Test Director.
  
  
• Services team has been initiated in Jan 2005. The offshore services team will assist the onshore services team in implementing the Valdero solution at client sites.
  
  
• The extended offshore engineering team has continued to grow and the current team size is 14.

Informance Overview: Informance International (www.informance.com) offers solutions in the space of Manufacturing Analytics that help manufacturing companies to monitor and improve their productivity. Informance's flagship product, The FactoryPulse™ System, introduced in 1996, is an integrated, portable hardware and software system designed to analyze productivity through cycle time and downtime analysis.


Informance Customers: Informance’s customers are some of the top manufacturers from around the world including Clorox, Unilever, Cargill, Merck, Chevron, General Motors, Intel, Motorola, and Celestica.


Development Environment: .Net, C#, Visual Basic, MS SQL Server, Crystal Reports, Graphics Server, Winrunner, Mercury Test Director, Visual SourceSafe, Source Offsite

Type of Service provided by CIStems: Extended Offshore Engineering Team providing Development and Quality Assurance Services. The team is dedicated to Informance.

Nature of Billing: Monthly billing for the extended engineering team based on differentiated person month rates.

Duration: Ongoing since May 2003

Peak Team Size: 8 and growing.

Distributed Workspace: VPN, Shared source code repository using Visual SourceSafe and Source Offsite, Mercury Test Director, and Twiki.

Exchange Visits: Short exchange visits of one to two weeks were encouraged for the onshore and offshore team to improve coordination and integration.

Engagement Overview:

• The engagement kicked off in May 2003. Knowledge transfer happened through phone calls, instant messaging sessions, emails, and exchange of documents.
  
  
• The initial team consisted of two developers.
  
  
• Before we started the development, FactoryPulse was a desktop product. The data from data logger devices was stored in Access Database; and users could view reports on the desktop.
  
  
• The first task for the offshore team was to develop a central server; to which several FactoryPulse clients can connect and transfer the data collected from the data logger devices. The central server was developed as a web service using the .Net framework.
  
  
• The second task for the offshore team was to create a web based enterprise reporting system that could be used to view the reports based on the data in the central server.
  
  
• The team is currently developing a new Quality module; that can be used to analyze the manufacturing defects.
  
  
• The development team is fully integrated with the onshore team in US; and there is common iteration plan for the onshore and offshore team. Each iteration consists of 2 weeks. There is practically no distinction in terms of the tasks assigned to the onshore and offshore team, both the teams collaborate on fixing bugs, developing enhancements for existing functionality, and developing new functionality.
  
  
• A software quality team of two person has also been created in India, which will be working on creating manual and automated test cases, executing test cases, and reporting defects.
  
  
• The extended offshore engineering team has grown from 2 to 8.