Offshore Business Process Re-engineering & Application Development for a Leading European Hotel Reservation Company
Company
The client is one of Europe's leading hotel reservations and event management agency. The client has numerous blue chip companies as its customers and books over 2 million room nights worldwide every year.
Challenge
Our client had a legacy system, which had a number of inadequacies including gaps in functionality poor integration between internal modules as well as with external 3rd party systems. As an example, there were disparate systems for managing supplier information and client information. Further, customers could only post their booking requests and the booking processing as well as the confirmation processing were being carried out manually leading to poor response times. In addition, the underlying application platform was also getting outdated.
Our client decided that the best way to address these problems would be business process Re-engineering from the legacy environment to a service-oriented platform.
Solutions
Calsoft Labs proposed a solution where the client's entire system would be replaced by a re-engineered integrated solution. Since the client required a secure and scalable solution with minimum investment on proprietary software and licenses, Calsoft Labs suggested the development of the new system on J2EE Technology with Linux, JBoss and SQL server as the application development environment.
Calsoft Labs consultants understood the client's priorities and helped the client in making a plan for the entire application development. Keeping in mind the scope of the business process Re-engineering application, the system development was broken down into phases with several modules in each phase building-up to a final re-engineered solution.
Standards were laid-down for the entire development and individual projects were developed as per these standards. The modules were built in an n-tier architecture with each module communicating to the other module strictly through XML messages. This design allowed individual modules to be developed, extended and if needed replaced at a later date with minimum impact on the other modules.
The developed modules were delivered with extensive documentation to reduce maintenance cost and cut down time on time required for enhancements.
Calsoft Labs was able to bring down the total cost of ownership for the client using open-source software and packages while developing a true platform-independent application.
Customizable Online Booking Solution
In addition to the business process Re-engineering engagement, Calsoft Labs was also responsible for developing critical new application software for our client.
To maintain its competitive edge the client wanted to offer a customizable online booking solution to its corporate and retail customers. Calsoft Labs built an online booking solution through which a corporate or retail customer can make a hotel room booking, amendment or cancellation in any of the numerous hotel groups and hotels in the UK. The solution comes with a customizable user-interface for individual customers and provides a powerful search engine with intuitive map-based search features. Further, customers can get the best of yearly contractual rates vs off-season and special offer rates from various hotels in real-time.
Benefits
The ODC model provides many advantages to the customer. Key benefits are
- Reduced development, maintenance and business Re-engineering cost
- Ability to ramp-up and down the team based on the product life-cycle of the project as per project plan
- Rapid response to key tenders with the ability to meet difficult time-to-market and tender requirements
- Client IT team augmented with an extended IT team from Calsoft Labs
- Better control over the projects when compared to a totally outsourced software application development model