Client Overview
Cascade Corporation is a global leader in the design, manufacture, and marketing of materials handling equipment and related technologies. Cascade Manufacturing Company was founded in 1943 with a total capital investment of $7500 in Portland, Oregon as a small machine shop employing just four people. The first recorded sales revenues involved the machining and assembly of stainless steel valves, pipe fittings, and other components. Today, Cascade is a leader in worldwide manufacturing and continues to grow as the premier supplier of lift truck attachments and related products.
Business Challenge
Cascade had manual processes in place for moving changes between its development, test, and production Domino environments. Without question, these manual processes were time consuming and error prone. The result was poor visibility of what code had changed between versions – which made rolling back the code extremely challenging. And these manual processes meant changes were not being implemented as frequently as desired.
In discussion with Teamstudio, Cascade defined several success criteria:
Automated recording of updates or changes made to databases
Version control
Clear and concise view of the development, testing, and production environments
Ability to compare changes between versions
Ability to collaborate with others and share information easily
The Teamstudio Solution
Teamstudio’s Build Manager and CIAO! products address the issues Cascade Corporation was facing. With Build Manager, application builds take much less time. And since activity detail is recorded, it is easy to keep track of what has been done to each database.
CIAO! provides features that are especially helpful when multiple developers are working on the same database. Features like check-in and check-out make it impossible to overwrite each developer’s work. The entire team can see who is working on the individual pieces of code.
Results
Since implementing Teamstudio’s tools, Cascade is able to better track versions as well as individual changes made in their databases. They have an easier time with rollbacks. For example, when a rollback is needed, they can choose between rolling back the entire template, or only rolling back one or two objects in a database. With the use of Build Manager and CIAO!, Cascade has cut down the time spent on object promotions by 75%.
The Version Repository gives Cascade a clear picture of where each change request is in their development and testing process. This has improved team communication and decreased the time to implement. In the four months since installing Teamstudio, Cascade has implemented 18% more change requests than were implemented in the previous eight months.
““Build Manager and CIAO! are very easy to use once you have them set up, and the training was well worth the time. Build Manager provides a clear view of everything. As a result, I am no longer the bottleneck!””