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How to design a large-scale automated system for a large enterprise in seven steps

Designing an automated system for a large company to work with its counterparties. Creation of two types of personal accounts at once: for an employee of an enterprise and for a dealer. Tasks that are not trusted by everyone. And we designed such a system for one of the leading manufacturers of building and finishing materials in Russia.

The enterprise is huge: several levels of managers, managers, trade marketers, analysts, accountants. And multiple interactions with about 150 dealers working in different regions of the country. This whole system had to be streamlined and automated.

There was something to work on. Firstly, the management did not have complete information about the final consumers of the products sold by the dealer, its real sales volume and stock balances. The supply of products because of this was not balanced. It came to such cases when gifts given to dealers based on the results of marketing campaigns did not reach them. At the company itself, managers accepted orders in the form of excel files and refused to share information about the current state of affairs. The company's management understood that this could not continue. At the same time, they did not dare to work with a large IT integrator due to the high cost of the work.

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Step 1: domain research


Studied in detail all the information about the activities of the company and products. I had to learn, for example, to distinguish from each other different types of plates and plasters. We got acquainted with the information on the customer’s website and on the sites of its competitors. Got access to the company's internal documents, rules, instructions, contracts with dealers, to the internal 1C system.

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Step 2: identify the main business goals of the CEO


Dialogues with the main person of the company turned out to be useful. Identified and agreed on the main objectives of the leadership. Namely:

  • Promptly organize data on company shipments. Based on these data, evaluate the overall picture of sales, track trends, make plans, solve identified and potential problems.
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3:


At this stage, dozens of interviews were conducted with company employees: division heads, managers at various levels, and marketing specialists. We used the methods of focus groups, monitoring the activities of people at their workplaces. In fact, for a month our specialists themselves became employees of the customer company. At least at the intern level. We delved into everything as carefully as possible. Up to the point that they sat behind the backs of managers and watched from start to finish how they work with orders. Managers, of course, cannot be envied in such a situation, but they had nowhere to go.

Particular attention was paid to the collection and analysis of information about the rights and access levels of company employees to data and how the employee can use this information. The task of collecting information was partly facilitated by company management. Two division heads were specially singled out, who, if necessary, could receive and give us the necessary information.

Data was also collected in the course of communication with dealers. We were lucky: in addition to the counterparties in our region, we also managed to communicate with representatives of others - just at that time the annual meeting of company dealers was held in our city. I must say that the prospect of making its activities as transparent as possible for the customer company was not particularly enthusiastic for most dealers. And in the course of communication it was difficult to talk to people and get feedback from them about problems and ideas for solving them.

The main result of this longest stage of the project was a detailed description of business processes, wishes, user tasks in UML, BPMN 2.0 notations and text files.

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Difficulties

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4:


Based on the data obtained, a large number of tables and diagrams of various types were created. They described data flows, all entities, their relationships, states and interactions.

A long list of objects, their attributes, types and sources was formed indicating what each of the employees can do with these objects in their personal account.

For example, a sales manager works with dealers and their orders, but cannot add new dealers and see how shipping takes place. He sees his plan, but does not see the general plan of the department. He sees the assortment of goods, but does not add goods to it. It can monitor the receipt of promotional gifts, but does not create promotions. Etc.

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Step 5: developing custom scripts


Created basic and auxiliary scripts for all types of users, behavior patterns.

Here is one fairly simple example of a user script. The head of the division decided to make sure that all orders of dealers are quickly and efficiently processed. To do this, in the orders section, the user selected orders for the last week and looked directly at the list with all their statuses. Then he selected orders with the status “in processing” and looked at which managers these orders belong to.

Our experts described several dozens of such scenarios for the MVP version. And even with this, absolutely everything could not be taken into account at this stage. The rest was planned for the next stages of the project development.

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Step 6: creating a user account structure


Based on the described scenarios, we determined a set of functional elements of the personal account for all types of users and the structure of sections and data. For each type, its own partition structure was designed with the functionality that it needs.

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Step 7: creating a prototype and technical specifications


The Axure tool was used to create an interactive prototype of the future system. After several meetings, we agreed on this prototype with the management of the customer company and drew up a clear and detailed technical specification for the first stage of work, on the basis of which we can deal with software development and subsequent implementation of the system.

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Three months passed from the beginning to the end of work on the project.

This was our first experience of such a large-scale analytical work. Now we are convinced that we are able to solve problems that many associate only with large IT integrators.

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