Agile development techniques
have allowed
Alliance Pharmacy to roll out an integrated
electronic point of sale system within six months of its merger
with
Boots the Chemist.
Agile programming enables end-users to work closely with
software developers throughout a project to improve the
functionality and usability of the final application.
The speed with which Alliance was able to combine the
flexibility of its in-house-developed Epos system with the engine
that drives Boots' Advantage loyalty card system helped to
consolidate the merger, said Sandy Byfield, IT project manager at
Alliance Boots.
The Epos system has been rolled out to 1,000 of the combined
group's 5,500 retail and wholesale pharmacies since shareholders
approved the merger in mid 2006.
The key aim of the project was to combine the strength of the
Boots brand, based largely on the 15 million people who have an
Advantage card, with the flexibility of the Alliance Epos system,
said Byfield.
Alliance hired software house K3 to develop the Epos system from scratch before
the merger, based on Microsoft's
Dynamics package. It took 12 weeks to develop and
roll out the pilot Epos system, complete with the product file and
interfaces to head office and branch financial systems.
"However, the merger meant the equivalent of open heart surgery
on the new Epos system, so we called K3 back," Byfield said.
"It was not straightforward. We were not going to run the
Advantage and Epos systems separately, and it was not an option to
replace them." This meant replicating the functionality of the
Advantage system in the same engine that drives the Epos
system.
Byfield solved the problem by splitting the work into two main
teams. One looked after the interface between the Advantage and
Epos systems for product file and financial information flows. The
other added the "deal engine", which drives the loyalty card's
offers, to the Epos system.
"The system was delivered two days early. It went live in 12
pilot sites in November 2006. More than 1,000 sites are now using
it in various formats, depending on their business mix," said
Byfield.
What is agile development?
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