Delivering a Well-Oiled IT Infrastructure

CUSTOMER SITUATION

Mexicana de Lubrecantes (MDL) is the largest motor oil distributor in Mexico. Headquartered in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, the firm has two production facilities located in Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco, and Tultitlán, Estado de Mexico. The firm’s marketing effort is national and international, reaching Mexico, Central and South America, plus Sweden.
When Unosquare began its engagement with MDL, the firm had an assortment of applications developed by another consulting firm and in-house resources. Several of these applications were put into the hands of its distributors which added technical support requirements for the firm. The firm had no central code repository and no source code control procedures.
MDL’s initial need was to update its web presence to support marketing activities. That was followed with extranet capabilities to better integrate marketing and sales with its distribution channel. That was followed with a series of software development and support activities of increasing sophistication, as well as a comprehensive assessment of MDL’s IT infrastructure.

WHAT UNOSQUARE DID

At the beginning of the engagement in 2004, Unosquare staff and project management worked directly with MDL’s marketing department and had little interaction with the IT staff. The website was developed to MDL’s specification. The project went smoothly and MDL was happy with the result, said Mario Di Vece, Chief Technology Officer of Unosquare.
With that project successfully completed, Unosquare was asked to develop an extranet to better integrate distributors, dealers and its entire sales channel. The extranet enables the sales channel to access price lists and to order promotional or sales material.
The first two projects were LAMP-based applications. The LAMP acronym references “L” for Linux, “A” for an Apache web server, M for MySQL, and “P” for PHP. Subsequent Unosquare development projects for MDL shifted to a WAMP architecture, where Windows replaced Linux for the underlying operating system.
At this point the MDL-Unosquare engagement began to shift incrementally, project-by-project, but Unosquare now began supporting and developing MDL’s core business applications.
First, MDL handed off a Visual Basic 6 (VB6) application for distributors. The application supported invoicing, credit reporting, and “anything that an accounting system would do”, Di Vece said, but in a distributed environment.
This application was originally developed by another consulting firm. MDL considered it legacy code that needed to be maintained, but they did not want to invest a lot to rewrite the application.
Unosquare now provides level 3 supports for this application, which is low-level support, and may include changes to the Visual Basic code of the application to fix problems. This particular application is provided by MDL to its distributors. If a distributor reports a problem to MDL, Unosquare will investigate the report and make the necessary changes.
Since taking over support for the application Unosquare has updated the application with bug fixes and added new reports.
About one year into Unosquare’s engagement with MDL, the company wanted to significantly update an important application that essentially supervised the entire operation. By this time, Di Vece said, Unosquare was well acquainted with MDL’s business and had solid relationships with the firm’s employees.
This analytical web-based application contained all the invoices and enabled data analysis in a variety of ways. Sales can be parsed, among other things, by sector, sales person, and branch. The application also determined the bonuses to be paid to distributors based upon their sales volume.
Next on tap was a new analytical services application for executive data mining. Unosquare implemented Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) cube data structures to more efficiently process large amounts of data along multiple dimensions and using a variety or data measures. The ability to “slice and dice data across several dimension” makes it far easier to visualize and report trends, Di Vece said.
For instance, if an executive wanted to see sales volume by region for the first half of 2010, the data measure would be sales volume and the dimensions would be region and date.
MDL then began to give Unosquare more and more programs and utilities to update or completely rewrite.

An important development project in progress is an electronic invoicing application for its distributors. Di Vece said these applications are very sensitive and highly regulated in Mexico. “We are working with encryption, certificates, content digests, and content signing”, everything necessary to meet national standards, he said.

RESULTS

Unosquare now has ten ongoing projects with MDL. Nine are providing level 3 support for development work that has been completed and a tenth is the electronic invoicing effort. During the course of the engagement, Unosquare’s work evolved from peripheral projects to revamping MDL’s core IT infrastructure. MDL has now outsourced all of its IT development and support to Unosquare.
At that point Unosquare took a comprehensive look at the MDL’s IT infrastructure. There was no central code repository and no source code control procedures. Change control tracking services were added as value-added service. All the source code is hosted by Unosquare with strict check-out and check-in procedures.
Unosquare also added issue management services as a value-added service. This provided MDL with full visibility of every hour worked on each issue or project. Issues are submitted and documented. Every two weeks MDL gets a comprehensive report of all outstanding issues, completed issues, and hours spent by issue.
A side-effect of the fairly casual IT environment at MDL was that, as their customer and distributor base grew, the performance of some MDL applications were degrading. Unosquare’s solution was to move the data and applications from MDL servers to servers within secure data centers. Unosquare migrated four of their customer applications and the results were very positive, Di Vece said. There were no more lags in performance and the number of simultaneous users per application was significantly increased.