Client is the world's largest research-based biomedical and pharmaceutical company. It is a global leader in health care, providing access to safe, effective and affordable medicines and related health care services. It has leading portfolio of medicines that prevent, treat and cure diseases across a broad range of therapeutic areas; and an industry-leading pipeline of promising new products in areas such as oncology, cardiovascular disease and diabetes.
Client is headquartered in New York, with major research and development locations in the United States and England. Recent innovations include Sutent®—a novel cancer medicine that cuts off blood supply that feeds tumors and destroys cellular reproduction.
The Application
The Managed Care rebate contracting function of the Contracting Operations business function of the client has the responsibility of developing, administering and managing managed care contracts and rebates.
These contracts and rebates are maintained in a 13 year-old internally developed client/server application Manage Care Contracting (MCC). The technology is not current and after years of maintenance and enhancements, the system has become quite burdensome and costly to maintain. In 2006, a formal project was initiated to perform a requirements gathering for the next generation MCC. The project was completed and the next step was to customize the managed care rebate engine of the I-Many packaged software solution with key objectives being flexibility, scalability and usability. The solution implemented was to provide a quantifiable saving over the long term and be adaptable to changing business processes as well as meet client’s long term technology strategies.
The Challenges
Alliance started knowledge transition to understand the existing I-Many packaged software solution, identify infrastructure requirements to create development and test environments at Alliance as well as understand managed care domain. The testing team validated existing I-Many packaged software solution functionality on test environment and started test case design phase based on the business requirements. The test case design approach was reviewed with business users to ensure that they are effective and useful. SQL test scripts were created by understanding stored procedures and views on different database schemas to validate each data point during data transformation as well in reports.
The Alliance Approach
- Alliance included a highly experienced Senior Tester in the team to assess and recommend the approach for Functional and Database testing
- Alliance infused its onshore methodology, appointing both onshore management resources and offshore testing resources, to build customer relationship. Alliance added value to the customer by offering reliable and quality deliverables to the customer and implementing a seamless collaboration between multiple teams
- Alliance adopted well-defined functional and database testing and management processes for managing requirements, development of functional test scripts and deliverables. Being an ISO 9001-2000 and CMM5 company, the established processes focused on defining and measuring the quality of deliverables to the customer and continuous process improvement
- Alliance recommended an approach for test design to make it effective and useful for testing both Data warehouse as well as each data point in the Cognos reports
The Key Deliverables and Achievements
- Creation of a test strategy and plan
- Alliance testingteam designed and executed functional test scripts for 11 interfaces, all signed-off by the reviewers without any comments
- Alliance testing team designed and executed functional and SQL Query test scripts for 13 reports, all signed-off by the reviewers without any comments
- Provided test execution results and a detailed defect document with screen shots and steps to reproduce the same
- Created test Summary report and Defect Summary report for each milestone in the project outlining test results with key metrics
The Technology
Alliance was able to ramp up its technical team according to the client’s needs with a minimum lead time, allowing for optimal testing. I-Many packaged software solution is using Oracle 10g PL/SQL and Cognos 8 Report Studio on Red Hot Linux EL4.
Alliance was able to assemble a core team with the required domain expertise. Domain knowledge to the rest of the team was imparted through internal sessions organized with the customer. The team assembled to work on this product/application with high level of expertise on all the above technologies and tools, and continuously upgraded their skills to cope with the customer’s requirements to move to newer and latest technologies.
The Results
- Alliance has been delivering each phase of the new solution as per defined milestones, largely due to its well-defined testing and management processes
- Client was able to rollout the major release to the Business successfully realizing the projected business gains
- Alliance Consulting became a trusted development partner, expanding the customer’s resources and ROI
Alliance also offered expertise in Software Development, custom application development, net application development and the software development process apart from other cross functional areas helped Alliance to ramp up and deliver to client satisfaction.
Contact Us
Contact Us today to speak to a Practice Leader who can discuss how Alliance's Application Development Services teams proficient in .NET application development, Java application development, and open source technologies can help you .
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