A 400,000 pound software development contract was awarded to Mastek by the Innovations, the Direct Response Division of Kleenze, a top ranking home shopping company in the UK.
Mastek’s Mail Order System for Innovations
Innovations’ direct response mail order catalogues have substantial exposure and are therefore capable of developing strong recognition. Each of the company’s speciality catalogues is aimed at a distinct market segment and offers a focused assortment of merchandise designed to meet the needs of its target customers. In a 12 month period, approximately 24 million catalogues are mailed and 85 million are inserted in the press.
The centralised order processing and fulfillment centre for the company which is based in Swindon provides services for all the brands and currently this centre handles around 20,000 orders a day during peak periods.
In a highly competitive Mail-order industry, Innovations has been using the latest technology as a leading edge for their growth. With industry focus shifting towards customer orientation, business growth started demanding more flexibility in the operation of order fulfillment and customer service. Keeping this in view, Innovations examined their existing IT infrastructure and decided to move towards client-server technology.
Mastek has taken up the contract as a System Integrator. The evaluation of hardware, networking and development tool was carried out by the Technology group experts at Mastek’s SEEPZ offshore factory in Mumbai in close coordination with their UK office and vendors in UK.
A study team under the leadership of a senior Solution Architect validated the requirements jointly with the user. The high-level design of the software was carried out on-site. The detailed design and development of the software was shifted to Mastek’s offshore factory at SEEPZ, Mumbai.
To bridge the distance, Mastek’s Project Manager made periodic visits to the UK during all phases of the project. During the development phase of the project, customer representative made visits to the offshore factory for validating the understanding of the development team – a quick walkthrough of the development process and preview of the software.
Mastek’s approach of delivering the software for a preview by the users for a ‘look and feel’ and then delivering the software after acceptance testing at the offshore factory helped Innovations increase the level of comfort during acceptance testing by the end users. The good understanding of the remote software development, the process of the change control, defect tracking and frequent Project Management meetings facilitated Innovations to have good control of the complete project.
The result of the partnership can be seen in the accomplishment of the 200 person months PowerBuilder / Oracle based client-server project for 200 users with a 50 GB data in a span of one calendar year.