Customer: Vacasol A/S (Denmark)
Brief: This is one of the biggest projects we have delivered. Through this project, our people have demonstrated high ability to adapt to new culture and "can do" attitude. They have worked with experts from Denmark and South Africa to deliver an ERP system for danish customer.
Key sucesses: agile methodology, International Project Manager, working effectiveness across cultural difference, expertise in Microsoft technology, efficient cost.
Company overview
Vacasol Group was founded 2006 by a group of veterans in the field holiday house renting with the idea of using technology edge to be their strategic weapon to become a leading company in holiday rental across Europe.
Vacasol operates by partnering with hundreds of booking agents as well as existing renting agents. Therefore, Vacasol International A/S needs a system to manage all properties from its partners and make it available for customer to search, and place booking online.
Business challenges
The system should manage properties that available for rent from hundreds of partners all over Europe. It would also manage thousands of booking agents with different booking rules.
All of the extra services available to customer must be managed so that it enable user to have access and place booking for the properties by the easiest and quickest way regardless of geography, time or money.
The processes of booking, payment, administration must be automatic to save the partner companies money and resources.
As an online business, fast response time is a key to Vacasol web site. Also, each partner has their own existing system that they have been using to manage the houses; hence, there is a need for a migration of the existing data such as properties information, booking details etc.
How we helped
Phase 1: development
Team of 20 Vietnamese engineers and 10 Danish engineers working for 12 months.
The analysis has been done carefully by onsite consultants and offshore Business analyst taking into account many complicated business rules and workflow. The number of potential users, different user’s purposes, and potential big size database has also been considered.
Teamwork
The solution that has been developed is a SOA system based on Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and SQL 2005 technology. The core of the system is built as several WCF services functioning different features, 2 WCF clients, some web-based frontends. The services are the central unit contains all business rules processing that also handles the communications between clients and databases. The WCF clients/frontends are built to serve different user’s needs such as customer, Vacasol’s administrators and other partner’s administrators.
The solution includes an infrastructure system to host the application that would serve a huge number of customers all over Europe.
During the course of project, DTT Globeteam has some members worked closely with customer, others work offshore. The communication has been done via chatting, conferencing and frequent travels between both sites by the developers, testers and consultants. Project assets are stored centrally allowing access from everywhere, by everyone (project team and customer) with the help of Microsoft Team Foundation System.
Phase 2: upgrade and maintenance
Team of 6 Vietnamese engineers are working on system upgrade and maintenance (2 of them are permanent on customer’s location). In this phase the main goals are optimizing administration efforts and improving sales, which can be gained by:
Duy Pham, Developer
- Optimizing system performance and stabilizing it
- Implementing and expanding reporting features to support better administration
- Improving the most-used & core features for better usability
Timeframe: 20 months (cont's)
Achievements
- Significant cost savings: rate of offshore resources is 1/10 of rate in Denmark
- Released working version 1 month late despite many challenges (many critical challenges solved by close collaboration between customer and onshore team).
- Involved complex solutions like high performance search engine, highly flexible pricing engine.
- Managed business use cases tightly
Teamwork