Case Study - Global Media Publications Firm

Project: Mainframe Order Management Legacy System Conversion to Enterprise Web Architecture Platform

Executive Summary Our client is a global media publications firm that markets and promotes consumer goods in 90% of the markets in North America. Our client provides a diverse assortment of product media promotion solutions designed to improve visibility and brand awareness, increase market share, and enhance product go-to-market and consumer goods sell-through strategies.

The Business Challenge The primary revenue-generating business unit (order management) was experiencing significant delays and bottlenecks in processing media orders throughout its conjoined sales, category management, layout, prepress and billing system, which in turn affected all lines of business. Furthermore, their IT system supporting these business processes was over 14 years old, difficult to maintain, and costly to adapt to their ever-changing business needs. Due to their lack of resource experience and strategy in migrating this mission-critical, revenue-generating legacy system to a new framework environment, our client sought to outsource this multi-faceted project to FirstShore on the breadth of its capabilities, experience and strength of delivery.

Challenge Being Met FirstShore business analysts, web technologists and architecture experts, working in partnership with the clients' business analysts, analyzed their business processes, current mainframe legacy system and business drivers, developed recommendations, defined improved business processes and developed a new N-tier, web-based framework architecture. Members of the FirstShore team were called upon to develop a new system interface, business-logic layer a web-enabled architecture that closely supports the order management process, and ultimately, to design and develop the new core order management transaction system and migration strategy from the former legacy system.

Services Provided
Outsourced technical competency relative to the following:

• Database Design
• Business Process Engineering & Business Analysis
• Web-Architecture / Framework design (Jakarta Struts / J2EE)
• Browser-based Interface & Creative Graphical Design
• Web-based testing methodologies and procedures
• Java, JavaScript & JSP language development

Benefits Being Delivered
The new system's N-tier design, web-architecture based framework and business-logic layer, combined with the ease of administration and use of the new web interface business processes, will enable the client to achieve:

• Greater feature capability
• Interfaces that support the true business processes of the order management series
• Increased order volume capture and faster order processing
• A reduction in the time and cost required for training new system users
• Reduced IT support costs
• Significantly increased functionality and feature capability from the legacy system
• Enhanced reporting, system integration and administration capabilities

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