Case study 4. Database development and support outsourcing contract ( Access and SQL Server )

	Professional Database Developers
Aldex Software Ltd.

Outsourcing Contract

Company Profile

Alcatel is a major player in telecommunications and the Internet with world leadership positions in high-speed access and optical networks. Alcatel's product portfolio includes everything from mobile phones to submarine cables, the company operates in more than 130 countries and employs 130,000 people worldwide.
Alcatel's business in the United Kingdom has grown rapidly over the last 10 years. Over 60 per cent of its revenues were from exports, making Alcatel the UK's largest exporter of communication systems. It employ nearly 3,000 people in the UK and undertakes sales, service, development and manufacturing, including the manufacture of around 40 per cent of the world's supply of undersea transmission systems at Greenwich. In 2000, the UK business had sales of over £20 billion.

Business Requirements

Alcatel was using an Access 2.0 database to handle returns for all equipment sold in the UK. The system handles returns, repairs, replacements, warranties, testing, logistics shipping & handling, stock control and the procurement of new equipment. This was originally developed in-house but was now starting to outgrow the original developer's capabilities to support it and, as the system had also by now become mission critical, they decided to outsource it's support and future development.

Our Solution

After the usual investigation and evaluation process we were pleased to be awarded the original contract in the spring of 1999. Our first objective was to rewrite the application to make it easier to support. This involved the implementation of Best Practice standards including a consistent naming convention, the addition of comprehensive error trapping and error logging (so we could find errors that weren't reported), the replacement of obsolete and badly written code and a general tidy-up of the whole application. We also trained a couple of our developers to be able to support the system (two developers rather than one so that we had maintain proper support during holidays, absences, etc.). We also set up the application in our standard support process (including a support call log, version control, change control log, audit log, etc.). Following this we undertook a series of modifications and enhancements to the system, a process which has continued ever since, and later converted the application from Access 2.0 to Access 97.

The following year the amount of data stored increased, the number of users on the system expanded and people from other locations started to use the application over the company WAN. At this point the system stared to complain with slow performance and an increasing number of database crashes. To rectify this we converted the back end database from JET (ie Access) to SQL Server; a procedure which also entailed a re-design of parts of the front end in order to make the system work properly in a client/server architecture. We also took the opportunity to improve the underlying database design to make it more relational. The end result was a five-fold improvement in average performance and the total elimination of database crashes.

The application currently has over 50 users spread over five different sites, processes 10,000 transactions each year and holds details of over 25,000 individual parts. The contract has now been renewed a further three times and we have full responsibility for all support and development of the application (and we have also developed various other applications for other departments within Alcatel). We support the application by a mixture of telephone calls, e-mails, dial-up into their network and by regular site visits.

Technology used :

SQL Server 2000

Microsoft Access (client side)

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