Collaborative Software Development
Background
Plant Parts is one of Europe’s leading independent parts specialists. Delivering an expert service for final drive gearboxes and travel motors, Plant Parts offers new, aftermarket, reconditioned and used
parts for a range of construction and industrial machinery.
The story so far
IJYI and Plant Parts have been working together for over six years. A partnership built on trust, IJYI have established a close working relationship with the Plant Parts team to ensure effective collaboration.
Sitting at the heart of the Plant Parts business operations is their business critical “Final Drives System”. This system is used for two separate sales streams; the Partner Website and the Public Offering.
The Partner Website is used as a sales tool which includes access for internal sales teams. The Public Offering allows end users to enquire about availability and to request quotes. End-users and partners
have the ability to search the Plant Parts extensive database to discover availability of specific parts, both new and reconditioned.
In the initial engagement IJYI performed a migration of a legacy Microsoft Access Database to provide flexibility, resiliency and disaster recovery capability. After the success of this piece of work, Plant Parts asked IJYI to begin adding additional products to the Final Drives System. This involved IJYI working closely with the Plant Parts team to establish an understanding of each other’s working processes.
As part of the strategic roadmap, IJYI rewrote and redesigned the Public Offering to improve ease of use and customer experience. This was a major piece of work which had a direct impact, allowing Plant Parts to continue growing that side of the business.
Results
- Doubled number of quotes requested
- Doubled conversion rate of quotes
- More users are requesting multiple quotes
Technologies
- ASP .Net MVC. SQL Server 2014
- SQL Server Reporting Services
- SQL Server Integration Services
- Entity Framework
- NFeature
- AngularJS
Ongoing Support
IJYI have continued to provide Plant Parts with ongoing support services. This has involved out of hours support to ensure that critical business systems are kept running and optimised. IJYI are currently providing regular patch, fix and upgrade support and have been commissioned to structurally improve Plant Parts’ Access database.
Why IJYI
A key consideration when deciding on who to work with on a longterm basis was a combination of technical expertise and trust. IJYI have a highly skilled team with a wide range of technical capabilities.
Recognised as Microsoft Gold Partners for DevOps and Application Development, IJYI were able to satisfy Plant Parts’ need for technical expertise. This, combined with IJYI’s fresh approach to bespoke software development meant that Plant Parts found a partner who could work with them to deliver tangible benefits to the business.
Using Agile methodologies IJYI worked collaboratively with Plant Parts and adopted a continuous integration process. Daily update calls and ongoing dialogue throughout enabled continuous progress tracking.
Collaboration is key to any project success and IJYI clients are always
invited to work closely with the team as they work on customer projects. Clients are encouraged to be ‘hands on’, making changes and asking questions as the project progresses. This can be achieved in a variety of ways, one of the most successful is when clients join IJYI’s daily 15 minute scrum sessions and planning sessions. Clients are given access to and are able to create work items and indicate sign-off in project tracking tools, really making clients a part of the development team rather than sitting on the outside. Working this way enables customers to be part of the journey and ensures a successful outcome.
About the author
IJYI Ltd
IJYI Ltd.