Client Overview
As one of the world’s largest process manufacturing equipment companies in the world, this client has revenues in excess of $2 billion with more than 10,000 employees and is located in more than 30 countries.
Business Challenge
This division of a leading industrial manufacturing company was having a difficult time documenting their constantly evolving Notes applications. Most of the knowledge about their Notes applications was in the hands, or heads, of a few developers. As such, the client was concerned about losing critical application knowledge.
The client did have an IT governance policy in place that included the requirement to properly document applications. However, this was a manual process and the demands of the day-to-day business made it difficult to consistently adhere to this policy. As long as the application developers retained this information, development could continue developing and maintaining the applications, and end-users could continue to get trained on them.
Recently, one of their key Notes developers left the company. He had responsibility for more than 100 databases inherited from more than 50 different design templates. His development and maintenance responsibility was distributed to other members of the development team. Documentation for these applications was out of date, which created a challenge since the remaining development staff was unfamiliar with these applications. Without some help, updating the documentation so the applications could be properly supported promised to be a time consuming and expensive project.
The Teamstudio Solution
The client determined that they needed a tool to automate at least some of the process of documenting Notes applications. Coincidently, one of the client’s developers was working on a project with an IBM Notes developer who was using Teamstudio Analyzer. She was very impressed with how easily the tool could run through a database design and document the database design in a separate Notes database representing the design. She brought this to the attention of her manager who contacted Teamstudio to learn more about the capabilities of Analyzer.
Teamstudio provided the client with a walk-thru of Analyzer to demonstrate its full capabilities. Although the need to document existing applications was the client’s primary focus, they quickly saw the benefits of also using Analyzer to help them test and debug future application development activities.
Results
Since the client started using Analyzer against the production databases, every Notes application is documented and up-to-date. Furthermore, they estimate they are saving $2,000 each month due to automated debugging and testing activities during the testing phase of development. In the end, the client was able to address their IT governance compliance requirements while reducing the overall cost of managing their Notes applications.