ITeMGroup works with a major distribution company to develop its core operational system.

Background
The distribution company operates a large network delivering advertising material to household letterboxes.

In 1996, the company had sizeable operations in Australia and New Zealand, and a growing number of large clients with increasingly sophisticated delivery requirements.

The company's management commissioned the development of a core business operational system primarily to reduce transaction costs and improve communication with its delivery network.

The functional brief included the requirements to:
• Prepare proposals
• Build and maintain job and detailed delivery information
• Maintain and communicate Distribution Plans, Schedules and Volumes
• Compute Job Costs
• Pay Distributors
• Produce management information

The Challenge
The project went to tender in 1996 and a major Australian software house was appointed. The system was to be written in PowerBuilder on a Sybase platform.

Eighteen months later, however, the system was still not operational. The project was significantly over budget and the system could not "go live" due to major technical issues.

How ITeMGroup met the challenge!
ITeMGroup was called in to bring the project back on track. ITeMGroup's brief was to:

• Complete the essential development
• Overcome technical issues
• Build & manage a support team for the system
• Initiate, implement and guide changes and system upgrades in line with changing business needs
• Improve system availability and stability
• ITeM immediately replaced the original software developer's staff with its own people, who were deployed to work on-site alongside the company's own staff.

The new team brought a comprehensive set of skills to the project including:

• Project management
• Change management
• Software analysis
• Software design & development
• Hardware architecture
• Database administration
• By forging a strong, collaborative working relationship with both Sybase (suppliers of the database and development toolset) and Digital Equipment Corporation (who supplied the operating system and hardware respectively), ITeMGroup was able to successfully solve the original technical problems and control further budget over-runs.

Over the next twelve months the project was systematically implemented in all Australian states, with New Zealand to follow. During implementation, ITeMGroup trained the company's staff to ensure ongoing support for the system.

How the system delivers business success.
This is the core system underpinning the company's distribution's business and has more than 100 WAN users throughout Australia and New Zealand.

With this system, the company has experienced real business benefits including:
• 25% decrease in transaction costs
• The achievement of record profit levels by being able to deliver huge volumes (in excess of 4 billion items in 2001) without system failure
• Effective management of 20,000 contract Distributors and letterbox Deliverers
• GST compliance
• A reduction in systems support numbers by 75%

From a systems perspective, the benefits are:
• 99.8% uptime in tandem with major system changes
• Continual performance monitoring and capacity planning
• Support for large weekly batch payment processes
• High levels of system data loss protection
• A stable support team that was sourced and managed by ITeMGroup
• Interface with the company's internet based distributor system

Since "go live", more than a hundred change requests have been implemented and two additional major software versions released. ITeMGroup has implemented database load balancing programs and increased overall system volumes for batch processes.