A leading global provider of injectable drugs and infusion technologies was poised to launch a $60 million program that would affect $2.6 billion of their business. The program was a back office pricing system that sets up contracts and processes around $10 million worth of orders a day. With a myriad of factors to consider such as customer experience, user response time, information flow, and processing slow down and errors, 5Wyre was engaged for a 3-part process: First, to assess the project’s readiness for full production and provide advisory services for post-production support. Second, to remediate and manage the program. Third, to provide performance tuning and optimization services to ensure their system was running as efficiently as possible.
ASSESSMENT
5Wyre completed a thorough readiness assessment that included risk curves based on conversations with business and technology representatives, evaluating how well the application suite was tested, how well the system would be monitored once in went into production and how the software was written. The assessment also looked at the infrastructure from a monitoring perspective and a back-up resource perspective as well as the in-house application knowledge.
The results were then delivered to senior members of the pharmaceutical commercial organization as well as internal IT. The findings included:
- Users would be finding problems before IT would
- Users wouldn’t be aware of problems with business transactions and reconciliation would be difficult
- Users would have reduced productivity for extended periods of time
- Unexpectedly long-running nightly batches would occur
- Tasks would take longer than necessary to complete and business transactions could fail without any knowledge
- Recovery from system failure risked incurring data loss
REMEDIATION
After reflecting on the significant risks identified in the report, the project launch was postponed. To remediate the issues determined in the readiness assessment, manage the application/operations monitoring and test the remediation project plan, 5Wyre deployed a six-person team comprised of experienced application, data and infrastructure architects to work with the existing project team.
The 5Wyre team worked directly with the project lead to manage the remediation effort, lead the application and operations monitoring track of the remediation project plan and coordinate the testing track, which included the definition and completion of true regression, performance and parallel testing of the project.
The following actions were taken:
- Creating top 10 UI response issues and top 10 long-running queries
- Managing each of these lists
- Automated regression testing
- Defining access roles and testing business with these roles
- Establishing turnover application instrumentation best practices for IT infrastructure and operations
- Automating monitoring of UI response time
- Monitoring database response time
PERFORMANCE TUNING/IT OPTIMIZATION
While working in remediation, 5Wyre architects were assigned specifically to performance tuning, ensuring that the software was performing to its maximum potential. Our performance tuning efforts encompassed three main areas:
- Software testing – Using our unique “black box” approach, we fully analyzed the software to determine what areas were causing lags in performance.
- Hardware environment change – 5Wyre testing determined that software performance could be dramatically improved with different hardware. Before we could complete any changes to the software, an overhaul of their hardware was completed.
- Analysis and tweaking of software – Once the hardware overhaul was completed, 5Wyre architects moved forward with comprehensive testing of the software to determine what additional steps could be taken for enhanced performance.
MEASUREMENT
5Wyre’s pragmatic, time-sensitive approach was designed for maximum effectiveness and to deliver immediate value in the quickest period of time — as well as over the long term. In addition to working seamlessly with the Project team to help drive the remediation plan and insure a successful project launch, 5Wyre developed a program to measure progress that included:
- Reviewing project progress with the CIO and CTO, Project leadership members and representatives from the business’ commercial organization during the course of the work
- Holding a progress review upon the completion of major milestones to go over findings, deliverables, and issues
As a result, all financials were reconciled, no customer impact occurred, the chargeback process worked, and system performance was acceptable. From an IT perspective, the following success metrics were established and satisfied:
- Production infrastructure was prepared
- Required resources were available
- Robust testing was completed and validated
- Solid cutover and backup plan was available
- The application performed as specified
- Data quality, data integrity and profiles were tested
The team of experts at 5Wyre can make a dramatic impact on the performance of your software and IT tools. Contact us today to learn how we can help your business achieve more.
