Infor WMS Applications Support For a Global Retailer
Table of Content
2. Business Situation and Challenges
3. Engagement Challenges and Xoriant Solution
4. Xoriant Contribution In Rollouts
5. Overview of Support Levels and Xoriant Approach
Our client is a multinational corporation based in India, expanding globally by establishing their operations in more than 25 countries across Europe, America and APAC regions including Thailand, Dubai, Singapore, Myanmar, Laos, Indonesia, Philippines, Egypt, Canada, Australia, and China.
Our client is a prominent player in the retail and consumer products segment with a large network of super- and hypermarkets. With a strong product portfolio of personal care, home care, household care, apparel, and general merchandise products, our client is recognized for impactful retail and visual merchandising. They consistently provide consumers a complete and differentiated shopping experience while delivering superior returns to stakeholders.
BUSINESS SITUATION AND CHALLENGES
With shoppers seeking both convenience and new taste, our client had to expand their product lines aggressively. This expansion required increase in headcount to support the ever-increasing product portfolio in ever-shrinking life cycles. The global economic slowdown forced their partner retailers to monitor costs. Our client sought technology at the point-of-sale and within the supply chain to manage the complexity.
Most of our client’s retail operations were driven by customized solutions in merchandizing, supply chain management, in-store operations, promotions planning and seasonal demand planning. Our client had implemented Infor WMS 2000 Exceed in four distribution centers (DCs) and wanted to rollout to 17 more DCs immediately. As Infor WMS 2000 is a niche technology, our client was looking for an expert partner with a wide variety of disciplines to support, customize, update and to integrate this automated solution to all existing as well future depots. Our client wanted a partner who could take over the complete production support of the implemented system and bring in industry’s best practices ensuring minimal downtime.
ENGAGEMENT CHALLENGES AND XORIANT SOLUTION
The Xoriant team discussed with our client counterparts the in-depth complexities of their existing systems and business operations. Due to the niche and specialized nature of the technology system involved, Xoriant decided to formulate an onsite-offsite model with the right blend of functional and technical experts with expertise in retail and several other industries to help our client remain competitive in the retail segment.
Xoriant’s customer centric approach and team’s ability to understand customer specific retail business set us apart from competition. Xoriant team came up with detailed project scope, on the job training concept and outlined onsite call handling capabilities. Challenges pertaining to this niche segment were highlighted and each solution was designed around understanding the issues faced by our retail client across merchandising, supply chain and warehousing. Our team came up with the following challenges:
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Reducing the turnaround time for production issues like Load Close and Inventory Reduction that directly impact the shipping process
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Ensuring availability of accurate inventory status to reduce production delays and idle time for critical production process
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Providing a solution to an interface (between Oracle RMS Application and Infor WMS) malfunction blocking, which resulted in a ‘hung’ status for many critical inbound, outbound and shipment processes
XORIANT CONTRIBUTION IN ROLLOUTS
Xoriant kicked off the rollout plan across 17 DCs while remaining in sync with key process groups to resolve issues immediately. This was achieved through access to a diverse resource pool with deep technology expertise and vast experience of large-scale application development and maintenance projects. We developed templates incorporating validation and error-handling routines, resulting in a reduction of coding and testing by 25-30% and thereby, smoother rollouts.
Xoriant completed the rollout in a record time of 3 weeks for each DC which included the following activities.
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Prepare and Configuration of the System
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Testing
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Key user and End user training at the DC level
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Cutover Plan
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Go live
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Support
Our Production Support activity included monitoring the root-cause of delays on different application component failure points. These incidences were handled through an Incident Management Tool to analyze and correct erroneous modules.
We organized training sessions and detailed documents outlining the business processes. We also maintained a comprehensive knowledge base of these documents to streamline the process of resolving production support queries, and for quicker and more effective employee training.
Xoriant introduced SLA-based support model to empower the end user daily activities, managing support incidents, development requests and overall project management practices
OVERVIEW OF SUPPORT LEVELS AND XORIANT APPROACH
According to Xoriant’s support methodology, in generic terms, level of support indicates the extent of assistance provided by the support personnel. Level 1 help desk is the primary contact for the end user. Level 2 is the first level of escalation and normally deals with bugs, failures, development of workarounds. Level 3 is the second level of escalation and provides solution to complex problems, code changes, enhancements.
Process Flow
The high-level process flow is shown below:
Level 1
Level 1
The Level 1 Support representatives communicate with the customers to gather appropriate technical information for the problem and then attempt to find a solution. Most of the requests are handled and ultimately resolved at this level. The Level 1 responsibilities include:
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Online support –Incoming customer requests are received for support by the Web, e-mail or phone.
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Offline support – For those problems not solved during the first contact with the customer, the technical support representative informs the customer the next course of action and then begins the offline support.
In the offline support the support representative investigates the pending incidents and escalates unresolved incidents to Level 2 support as per the prevailing format.
The support representatives follow up with the customers, contacting them to work through the problems, answer queries, report status of pending issues, update customer expectations, get more details about a pending issue and request a pending issue be closed if the customer is satisfied with the solution provided. In cases where the product is not performing as intended, the technical support representative reports the problem to the Quality Assurance team and maintains these reports in Software Problem Report database.
Level 2
If the Level 1 support is unable to provide a resolution to an incident within a specified time frame, the incident is escalated to the next level, Level 2. The Level 2 support team has good knowledge about the product and the appropriate technical skills needed to resolve the incidents that could not be resolved by Level 1 representatives. The Level 2 activities are generally offline in nature. The Level 2 responsibilities include:
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Simulating the customer environment for duplicating the problem.
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Reporting of product issues to the Quality Assurance group and recommend priorities to resolve the problems.
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Working closely with the Sustaining team to analyze, understand and resolve difficult pending issues.
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Escalating the unresolved incidents to the Sustaining Engineeing team according to the specified guidelines.
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Proactively reviewing the pending incidents and providing suggestions and assistance to Level 1 support engineers for resolving the problem.
Level 2:As part of Level 2 support process, SLA’s were defined for support operations based on criticality of the problem illustrated below:
Sample Response and Resolution Targets
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Priority |
Target Responses |
Target Resolution |
Solution (One or more of the following) |
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One
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½ business day
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Within 2 business days
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|
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Two
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1 business day
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Within 5 business days
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|
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Three
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1 business day |
Within 10 business days |
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Four
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2 business days
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Within 10 business days
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The following steps are followed at Xoriant for managing product releases:
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Preparing Product Release Plan: A release plan is chalked out for major releases (viz. 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 etc.) as well as intermediate patch releases (viz. 1.0 A, 1.0 B etc.)
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Identifying components/files for the release
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Execute the Plan – Design and Code Freeze
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Staging
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Production Release
Xoriant’s key contributions in the Release Management process were:
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Formed an exclusive Interface monitoring team which created a script to process failed transactions and kill the inactive and hung processes while simultaneously sending alerts to all concerned team membes when the number of transaction reached a threshold level, thereby avoiding the process stoppage.
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Developed a solution to process multiple loads simultaneously using kernel level scripts thus bring down turnaround time for this activity
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Developed a tool to track the information flow between the Infor WMS and the Host system to identify ‘Stock on Hand’ data mismatches and rectified it to obtain correct Inventory status
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Constituted an 18X7 centralized support center to ensure end to end complete WMS support to resolve the problem to gross level and not just at component level
System Architecture Overview
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Microsoft Navision - ERP
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Exceed 2000 WMS – Warehouse Management System
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Microsoft BizTalk - Business process integration platform
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Oracle RMS – Retail Merchandising System
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Improved first call resolution percentage by 35%
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Achieved significant reduction of age of incident and incident volumes within first 3 months of the takeover of support operations.
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Enhanced customer satisfaction due to a drastically reduced error rate resulting from standardization of support processes across applications.
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Reduced average response time to user requests by over 30% by creating a knowledge base documenting critical issues and their resolution.
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Enabled our client to meet aggressive rollout schedules resulting in improved inventory control and reduced supply chain delays from 7 to 2 days
Client Testimonial
Xoriant’s strong desire to understand the specific drivers of our business and to create a customized set of recommendations was a key to our success. They met every milestone date and delivered a solution that resulted in significant savings for our organization going forward. We have now retained them to support us in executing their recommendations and we look forward to continue working with them.