CUSTOMER SUCCESS: Swisslog |
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"With Polarion we抳e been able to implement our worldwide, distributed development processes to achieve our quality standards and CMMI compliance."
–Tim Eick, VP Software and Control Development
About Swisslog
Founded in 1898, Swisslog抯 comprehensive portfolio ranges from building complex warehouses and distribution centers including Swisslog抯 Software, to in-house logistics solutions for hospitals as well as consulting services in the field of supply chain management.
Based on its detailed logistics expertise and broad project experience, Swisslog is focusing on the industry segments food and beverage, retail, pharmaceutical and healthcare.
With headquarters in Buchs/Aarau, Switzerland, Swisslog has approximately 2000 employees in 20 countries in Europe, North America, Asia and Australia. The company抯 turnover in 2006 was CHF 650 million.
Swisslog serves major customers worldwide, including Coca Cola Amatil, Wal-Mart, People抯 Bank of China, and Pfizer.
The Situation Swisslog Warehouse and Distribution Solutions division initiated a software process improvement program with the clear objective to improve the process and product quality of software development throughout Swisslog. Software development processes and methods needed to be standardized and rolled out in all countries where Swisslog does development. One of the milestones in the initiative was to achieve CMMI Maturity Level 2 compliance in the short term.
To implement this objective, Swisslog was seeking an integrated Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solution covering workflow- driven Requirements, Change and Task management, which would also encompassed project planning for distributed development, and could run under both Windows and Linux.
Two essential requirements were the flexibility to define the Swisslog-specific workflow for requirements, bugs and change requests, and bi-directional traceability from the requirement to the source code and from the source code back to the relevant bug report or requirement.
Swisslog also wanted the solution to support planning activities like roadmaps, and iterative release plans.
The Solution
After evaluating different ALM solutions in the market, Swisslog chose Polarion ALM for Subversion as the worldwide Application Lifecycle Management Platform.
Swisslog managers and developers saw that Polarion ALM would provide the customizable workflow they needed, plus the full traceability from requirement to source code (and vice versa) that they sought, all in one fully integrated system. The web-based client-server application was perfectly suited to the company抯 distributed development model, and supported Swisslog抯 specific collaboration and communication needs. Moreover, the transparency provided by Polarion ALM抯 揕ive ALM Technology�(real-time dashboards, reports, audits, and metrics compiled from real development data and development artifacts stored in a central subversion repository) would provide assessors with a clear picture of how CMMI compliance is shaping up.
Swisslog and Polarion Software worked out a migration and role-out plan. Part of this plan was migration of the company抯 existing data and repositories (CVS, PVCS, TeamTrack), along with their history, into Polarion ALM for Subversion using expertise and free migration tools provided by Polarion Software.
The Benefit
With Polarion, Swisslog was able to implement their own development workflow thus ensuring that the development process in Swisslog is consistent in all the different development locations.
A major benefit for Swisslog is the massive traceability capabilities of Polarion, which comply with CMMI Maturity Level 2 and 3 requirements. The intuitive web user interface and the customizable shortcuts for different user roles significantly reduced the learning curve within the rollout, so the first productivity and quality improvements were apparent very shortly after the migration and implementation.Top Benefits in the Solution
- Full bi-directional traceability from change requests, requirements and tasks to the relevant implementation source code in one system to support CMMI certification.
- Polarion抯 single-source architecture with both web and Eclipse clients, coupled with a central Subversion repository, is ideal for managing distributed teams in Switzerland, Asia (Malaysia), North America, and Europe.
- Live project and capacity planning and monitoring of all tasks eliminates guesswork and delivers complete transparency of the development process, across all projects and implementation, at any time.
- User configurable workflow allows the system to be tailored to company-specific life cycle processes.
- Professional services from Polarion Software helped Swisslog to migrate existing systems to Polarion, set up their custom system configuration, and educate users an system administrators.
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