Supercharging Spend Management with Product Engineering and Sustenance

Client Background

The client, a longstanding leader in spend management software, has consistently committed to delivering new features while maintaining the current version of their cloud-based product for all customers. Their reputation in the industry is built on a solid foundation of reliability and innovation in managing organizational spend.

Challenge

Faced with the dual demands of supporting product sustenance and accelerating new feature development, the client sought to expand their product engineering team. The primary challenges bought forward by the client’s executive leadership team were:

• Addressing high volume quality backlogs and defects: Quickly resolving one-year worth of backlog of customer-reported issues as well as internally reported defects to enhance satisfaction and reliability. 180 defects reported across strategic contracts and core procurement products per month.
• Developing engineering capacity: Ensuring the team could handle the increased workload of feature delivery.
• Scaling capacity sustainably: Establishing a model to manage outsourced product engineering effectively and cost-efficiently.

Key Solution Provided

To address these challenges, Xoriant proposed a range of a multi-faceted approach. Xoriant handled complete sustenance engineering with involvement from just the client’s engineering leadership team.

• Creation of an Extended Engineering Team: An engineering team was established at a cost-effective location. This team was tasked with supporting both product sustenance and new feature development.
• Knowledge Transfer and Process Streamlining: Successfully transferred product knowledge so the new team and streamlined engineering processes for efficient remote delivery. Also created the knowledge repository (sessions conducted by client SMEs and Xoriant leads), reverse engineering and documentation.
• High Volume of Fixes and Feature Development: Within the initial five months, over thousands of fixes, including high-priority defects, were delivered alongside ongoing feature development, and prioritization.
• Defect Resolution Capacity & QA Automation: The team ramped up to sustain a defect resolution capacity ensuring ongoing product stability and improvement. This included complete QA automation including updating the regression test suite and sign off required before deployment
• Expansion for Advanced Development & QA automation: The team was further expanded with additional members to focus on complex feature development ensuring the client could stay ahead in technological advancements.
• Managed Services Model: A robust managed services model was implemented, where an extended team works on two products with clear ownership of deliverables with committed productivity, ensuring accountability and consistent performance.

Business Benefits

• Increased Capacity: Quickly established additional capacity for product sustenance and L3 support, ensuring the client could meet ongoing maintenance demands without compromising new development. We also liberated the architects’ team so they could prioritize the development of new-generation products.
• Experienced Workforce Utilization: Leveraged a skilled workforce for higher value tasks, reducing the lead time for feature delivery and allowing the core team to focus on strategic initiatives. We also brought down the defect backlog of 12 sprints per month to just 1 sprint for each product within 16 to 18 months.
• Enhanced Customer Satisfaction: Focused on quality improvements and rapid response to new feature demands, leading to better customer satisfaction and retention.
• Cost-Effective, Predictable Capacity: The managed service model provided a cost-effective and predictable capacity, reducing operational risks and ensuring scalability to meet future demands.

Tech Stack:

SAP Ariba proprietary frameworks for UI, Persistence, Messaging layers, Git, Tomcat, Java, Oracle DB, SAP Hana, Spring, Spring Boot, Angular, Typescript, HTML4, CSS