The Challenge
A world-renowned designer, manufacturer, distributor, and retailer of fashion and luxury goods was preparing to roll out a new, global point-of-sale solution. With nearly 280 stores in 37 countries, the implementation posed some complex, daunting challenges. Procedural inefficiencies, limited resource availability, and a shortage of quality assurance expertise threatened to undermine the project. To tackle these issues, the retailer enlisted the help of Sophelle to provide much-needed project management and quality assurance reinforcements.
Sophelle’s Assessment
Sophelle consultants discovered that many of the retailer’s business processes were informal and unnecessarily cumbersome. Existing requirements gathering methods were particularly complicated, and as a result, the POS vendor-client relationship was, at times, strained. After conducting a thorough analysis, Sophelle determined that the introduction of formalized procedures and process enhancements could significantly impact the project’s efficiency.
Additionally, there were no Quality Assurance professionals on staff and existing staff were inexperienced in testing best practices and test automation. Testing procedures were entirely manual. With new POS code releases arriving on a twice-weekly basis, the turnaround time for each manual test cycle was prohibitively long.
Vendor Interaction
A combination of Sophelle’s vendor management experience and the establishment of a more efficient client-vendor interaction process served to improve client-vendor relations that had previously been strained.
Project Management
By adopting industry best practices tailored to the client’s unique circumstance and culture, Sophelle provided overall project management, leading the other regional project managers.
Testing
Sophelle quickly enhanced the state of the retailer’s quality assurance and testing processes. Sophelle provided professional QA resources and instituted best practices. Formal test management tools and procedures were introduced. Mercury Quality Center was implemented, facilitating accountability and providing global visibility to the entire software development lifecycle. Mercury QuickTest Pro was deployed for automated testing.
Result
Sophelle’s efforts greatly streamlined vendor-retailer collaboration efforts and improved ongoing relationships. The introduction of automated testing to the quality assurance process was huge success. Over 280 test scripts were automated, reducing test cycle time from over 60-person hours to less than 4 hours, and greatly improving testing accuracy. Sophelle produced a series of user-friendly reference guides clearly documenting the details of the newly introduced tools and processes. The result was a situation that allowed for extremely rapid development and deployment of the global POS system. The retailer was able to meet a very aggressive delivery timetable and their users have expressed great satisfaction with the new system.
Please Contact Sophelle today for more information.
