Trillium Helps Leading Fleet Leasing Company Improve Quality of Solution Development

Dec. 11, 2012 - PRLog -- Trillium’s client pioneered the concept of auto leasing, providing a full range of specialized services to help corporations manage their vehicle fleets. The client manages more than 300,000 vehicles in North America. Its holding company is worth $2 billion and currently ranks as the largest privately held fleet management company as well as one of the largest private companies in North America. The client provides fleet leasing services to many Fortune 500 companies and is proud of the innovation they have brought to the industry.

Challenge: Provide a consolidated, intuitive online resource to help corporate fleet users compare and select the best vehicles for their needs based on multiple decision-driving criteria

Trillium’s client was using a combination of custom built applications and spreadsheets to configure vehicles, calculate their life-cycle analysis (i.e., LCA - total cost of ownership,) and compare vehicle costs for their clients. The LCA calculations and vehicle comparisons were a highly manual, non-standardized, and time consuming process. The bulk of the effort was completed via spreadsheets that were not always standardized across the company resulting in possible erroneous dollar amounts.

The goals of the Vehicle Selector project were to develop a selection tool to search, compare and configure vehicles using catalog data, to produce a standardized LCA for selected vehicles with accurate pricing, and to create and publish templates for use in ordering.

Trillium was engaged midstream in the project. The client had selected a modified agile development methodology for the project. As the development for the various solution areas began, the project team discovered that some of the functionalities were technically more complex than originally estimated, and the quality of the code developed was lacking due the lack of documented requirements. Testing the available code was also difficult due to the lack of documented test scripts and detailed requirements. IT leadership came to the decision to stop development activities and brought strategic resources (including a Trillium resource) to help reset, re-organize and re-task the project to a more “traditional” development methodology.

Trillium Solution: Trillium provided a Quality Control strategy to validate the health of the solution

Trillium helped the client overcome significant challenges by providing a Quality Certification strategy, framework and best practice expertise throughout development lifecycle. Trillium, in collaboration with the client, implemented Quality Control processes and procedures for validating the solution against the project’s business and technical requirements developed after the project reset. During this effort the project team created solution certification criteria, test scenarios and test data, test scenario reviews with development resources, regression testing, and identified quality metrics to help measure the “health” of the solution.

Results: Easier access to knowledge base and better preparedness for business continuity and growth

The overall benefit to the client was that the first production version of the new system was delivered with an agreed upon level of quality based on a common set of expectations from both the business and IT organizations (solution certification criteria.) There were clear exit criteria for moving components of the application through the development lifecycle which significantly reduced the “we can deal with that problem later” mentality that existed within the IT organization. The IT organization gained credibility by being able to meet or exceed the quality expectations that were set for the project. The solution delivered by this project earned our client a rank of number 18th on Information Week’s Top 500 listing of the nation’s most innovative users of business technology and the highest overall ranking the company has earned to date.

About Trillium

Trillium Solutions Group, Inc. is a professional services firm headquartered in Chicago that provides technology consulting and strategic sourcing services for industries such as trade associations, financial services, telecommunications, and healthcare. For more information, please visit www.trilliumsg.com.