Metacube Software

Global Trade

Overview: The Customer is a leading player in the Global Trade Management solutions space, and offers hosted solutions for trade compliance, trade visibility and trade finance. It delivers an end-to-end solution across order, shipment logistics and settlement to improve global trade operating efficiencies and cash flows.

Customers: A very large base of business customers including Delphi, Ross, Neiman Marcus, Renault, Liz Claiborne, Stryker, Hitachi, Bank of America, Cisco, Redcats and Tyco use these hosted solutions.

Development Environment: J2EE, EJB, Struts, Webworks, FreeMarker, Hibernate, log4j, Ant, XDoclet, Junit, JUnitEE, XML Schema, Oracle, WebLogic, AquaLogic BPM, WebMethods, MicroStrategy, Jasper, Bugzilla, Silk Test, Silk Performer, CVS

Type of Service provided by Metacube: Extended Offshore Engineering Team providing Development, Quality Assurance, Product Management, Global Trade Content, and Technical Support Services.

Duration: Ongoing since August 2005

Peak Team Size: 60+

Distributed Workspace: VPN, Shared source code repository using CVS, Bugzilla, Test Director, Wiki and Rally

Exchange Visits: Short exchange visits of one to four weeks were encouraged for the onshore and offshore team to improve coordination and integration.

Engagement Overview:

Customer’s Offshore Project Manager visited Metacube in July 2005 to meet the executive management and senior engineering staff, and to review the facilities.
Managing Director and VP Engineering of Metacube visited Customer office in July 2005 for one week to understand the functionality of the system, architecture, engineering process, and immediate needs for outsourcing.
First step was to set up the development environment for the offshore team, which included- VPN connectivity, access to CVS, Bugzilla and Wiki, synchronizing the code on developer workstations, running local build, and local deployment of the system.
The development team was assigned the responsibility to build two new modules- License Management and Document Reconciliation. The development team was provided the requirements document, and it interacted with the product owners in the product management group to understand and refine the requirements. The offshore team developed the architecture and design which was reviewed by Customer’s senior architect. The offshore team also had the ownership to develop the complete project plans for these modules. These two modules were completed on time and released on the hosted environment.
The development team was also assigned the responsibility for maintaining the Supply Chain Event Monitor module, which is being used extensively by the customers.
Knowledge transfer happened through Webex sessions, document sharing, mails, and a few exchange visits.
Subsequent to this the team was assigned the development of several new modules including CODM, Document Formula, Document Copy, Classification, Auto Number Generation, ITAR, Landed Cost, and Document Versioning. These modules have also been released to the production environment.
The India Development team now has complete ownership of Supply Chain Event Monitor, Document Management, Landed Cost, Classification, and Export Compliance modules.
The QA team was assigned the responsibility to develop the test plan, test cases, and test data for several important functionalities for the coming releases. They were also made responsible for testing and certifying these functionalities.
The QA team was also assigned the task for automating the test data creation using Silk, and also to automate some of the test cases. The QA team also came up with an ingenious solution to load test cases from Excel into test tracker using Silk.
The QA team also took over performance testing using Silk Performer.
Four Functional Analysts were added to India team. They help the Product Managers in defining the Product Vision and producing Functional Requirement Specifications for the product.
Global Trade Content team was also started in India. Customer tracks trade rules and regulations for around 65 countries. India team tracks Trade Rules and Regulations for a host of Asian countries and updates them in the application on day to day basis.
Messaging (WebMethods) and Reporting(MicroStrategy and Jasper) resources were added in India to support Customer’s Technical Services Team. .

Manufacturing Intelligence

Overview: The Customer offers solutions in the space of Manufacturing Intelligence that help manufacturing companies to monitor and improve their productivity, quality and overall equipment efficiency across multiple plants in an enterprise. The Customer’s first product, introduced in 1996, was a desktop based hardware and software solution designed to analyze productivity through cycle time and downtime analysis. We started working with the Customer in 2003, and in the last eight years the product has evolved from being a simple plant solution to a comprehensive enterprise solution, which is being used to introduce lean manufacturing across an enterprise.

Customers: Some of the top manufacturers from around the world including Clorox, Unilever, Cargill, Conagra, Merck, Chevron, Johnson & Johnson, Nibco and Celestica are using the Manufacturing Intelligence solutions provided by the Customer.

Development Environment: .Net, C#, Visual Basic, MS SQL Server, Analysis Server, Crystal Reports, Graphics Server, Quick TestPro, Mercury Test Director, Visual SourceSafe, Source Offsite

Type of Service provided by Metacube: Extended Offshore Engineering Team providing Development and Quality Assurance Services.

Duration: Ongoing since May 2003

Peak Team Size: 12+

Distributed Workspace: VPN, Shared source code repository using Visual SourceSafe and Source Offsite, Mercury Test Director, wiki and SharePoint

Exchange Visits: Short exchange visits of two to eight weeks were encouraged for the onshore and offshore team to improve coordination and integration.

Engagement Overview:

The engagement kicked off in May 2003. Knowledge transfer happened through phone calls, instant messaging sessions, emails, and exchange of documents.
Before we started the development, the solution was a desktop product. The data from data logger devices was stored in Access Database; and users could view reports on the desktop.

The first task for the offshore team was to develop a central server; to which several desktop clients could connect and transfer the data collected from the data logger devices. The central server was developed as a web service using the .Net framework.
The second task for the offshore team was to create a web based plant reporting system that could be used to view the reports based on the data in the central server.
The next major task was to develop the Quality module; that could be used to analyze the manufacturing defects.
Subsequently the offshore team rearchitected the product into an enterprise solution based on hub-spoke architecture supporting multiple plants.
The team also developed a new Enterprise Reporting System based on dimensional data model with drillable dashboard that is using Analysis Server in the background.
The development team is fully integrated with the onshore team in US; and there is common iteration plan for the onshore and offshore teams. Each iteration consists of 2 weeks. There is practically no distinction in terms of the tasks assigned to the onshore and offshore team, both the teams collaborate on fixing bugs, developing enhancements for existing functionality, and developing new functionality.
The team includes members that are dedicated to software testing. These members work on creating manual and automated test cases, executing test cases, and reporting defects.

Cloud Consulting

Overview: The Customer specializes in offering products and services that help enterprises adopt cloud based platforms and solutions. It has a proven track record of conceiving, architecting, designing and implementing complex, mission-critical enterprise systems based on the cloud paradigm. Areas of expertise include cloud adoption strategies for enterprise, salesforce.com, force.com platform development, Google Apps deployment, and Cloud integration tools.

Customers: Customer has helped 150+ enterprises build, implement and manage cloud solutions using a variety of platforms such as salesforce.com, force.com, Google Apps, Workday and Amazon. These enterprises include Thomson Reuters, Facebook, Dolby, Honeywell, Network Solutions, CRC Health Group, VMware and Qualcomm.

Development Environment: force.com, VisualForce, Apex, SOQL, Azure, .net, Java Script, HTML, Ajax, JQuery, extJS, Web Services, PHP, Adobe Flex, Amazon SSS and Google API

Type of Service provided by Metacube: Extended Offshore Engineering Team providing Development, Quality Assurance and Technical Support Services.

Duration: Ongoing since March 2007

Peak Team Size: 60+

Distributed Workspace: VPN, SVN, Google Apps, Salesforce

Engagement Overview:

Customer was going through the offshore partner selection process when one of their team members gave a strong reference for Metacube. Metacube responded to the vendor selection questionnaire and after a couple of calls and reference checks the Customer decided to go ahead with Metacube as the offshore partner.
The engagement was kicked off by Metacube being assigned the task of developing few Google gadgets that would interact with the salesforce.com application.
Metacube was new to both salesforce.com and the Google gadget APIs. It took on the challenge and with some guidance from the Customer team was able to successfully develop the gadgets.
Metacube was then initiated into a couple of salesforce.com customization and implementation projects. These were again successfully turned around by Metacube.
Customer then exposed Metacube to their entire consulting team that is doing slaesforce.com implementation projects, and Metacube team starting interacting with these consultants on one to one basis to partner with them in multiple ongoing projects.
Customer has found this model to be highly successful and has expanded the offshore team significantly.

Supply Chain Analytics

Overview: The Customer was a leading provider of enterprise class software solutions for real-time Supply and Demand Chain execution. The solutions helped create high velocity supply and demand chains through real-time visibility, collaboration, and execution. With these solutions businesses could shorten order cycle times, minimize inventory, and reduce shortages.

Customers: Applicable across manufacturing companies in the high technology, medical and consumer markets, the solutions were adopted by industry-leading companies such as Advanced Fibre Communications, Extreme Networks, Juniper Networks, Motorola, Polycom, Leap Frog, Tellabs and net.com.

Development Environment: J2EE, Java User Interface (Swing, Struts, Barracuda), EJB, Castor JDO, Jchart, log4j, Jive, Flux, XML Schema, Oracle, WebLogic, Jboss, Junit, HTTP Unit, Ant, Cruise Control, Mercury Test Director, Silk, Perforce.

Type of Service provided by Metacube: Extended Offshore Engineering Team providing Development and Quality Assurance Services.

Duration: Nov 2002 – July 2005

Peak Team Size: 12+

Distributed Workspace: VPN, Shared source code repository using Perforce, and Mercury Test Director

Exchange Visits: Short exchange visits of one to four weeks were encouraged for the onshore and offshore team to improve coordination and integration.

Engagement Overview:

Managing Director and VP Engineering of Metacube visited Customer Office in Oct 2002 for one week to understand the functionality of the system, architecture, engineering process, and immediate needs for outsourcing.
First step was to set up the development environment for the offshore team, which included- VPN connectivity, access to Perforce and Mercury Test Director, synchronizing the code on developer workstations, running local build, and local deployment of the system.
Initial set of tasks for the developers was to fix some of the bugs, which gave the opportunity to developers to understand the design and the code.
The next set of tasks involved implementing enhancements for the existing functionality.
QA team of 2 persons and one more developer were added in February 2003.
A complete new Replenishment module was developed by the offshore team from March 2003 to July 2003.
The development team got fully integrated with the onshore team in US; and the onshore and offshore teams worked on common iteration plans. The duration of each iteration was 3 weeks. There was practically no distinction in terms of the tasks assigned to the onshore and offshore teams, and both the teams collaborated on fixing bugs, developing enhancements for existing functionality, and developing new functionality.
The QA work was handled primarily by the offshore team; except for the QA manager who was located onshore. The QA team developed manual test cases, automated test cases using in house tool developed by the Customer, as well as automated scripts using Silk. The QA team also executed the manual and automated test cases; and defects were tracked on Mercury Test Director.
Services team was initiated in Jan 2005. The offshore services team assisted the onshore services team in implementing the solution at client sites.

Customers Domain Experience Testimonials Case Studies
	Global Trade Overview: The Customer is a leading player in the Global Trade Management solutions space, and offers hosted solutions for trade compliance, trade visibility and trade finance. It delivers an end-to-end solution across order, shipment logistics and settlement to improve global trade operating efficiencies and cash flows. Customers: A very large base of business customers including Delphi, Ross, Neiman Marcus, Renault, Liz Claiborne, Stryker, Hitachi, Bank of America, Cisco, Redcats and Tyco use these hosted solutions. Development Environment: J2EE, EJB, Struts, Webworks, FreeMarker, Hibernate, log4j, Ant, XDoclet, Junit, JUnitEE, XML Schema, Oracle, WebLogic, AquaLogic BPM, WebMethods, MicroStrategy, Jasper, Bugzilla, Silk Test, Silk Performer, CVS Type of Service provided by Metacube: Extended Offshore Engineering Team providing Development, Quality Assurance, Product Management, Global Trade Content, and Technical Support Services. Duration: Ongoing since August 2005 Peak Team Size: 60+ Distributed Workspace: VPN, Shared source code repository using CVS, Bugzilla, Test Director, Wiki and Rally Exchange Visits: Short exchange visits of one to four weeks were encouraged for the onshore and offshore team to improve coordination and integration. Engagement Overview: Customer’s Offshore Project Manager visited Metacube in July 2005 to meet the executive management and senior engineering staff, and to review the facilities. Managing Director and VP Engineering of Metacube visited Customer office in July 2005 for one week to understand the functionality of the system, architecture, engineering process, and immediate needs for outsourcing. First step was to set up the development environment for the offshore team, which included- VPN connectivity, access to CVS, Bugzilla and Wiki, synchronizing the code on developer workstations, running local build, and local deployment of the system. The development team was assigned the responsibility to build two new modules- License Management and Document Reconciliation. The development team was provided the requirements document, and it interacted with the product owners in the product management group to understand and refine the requirements. The offshore team developed the architecture and design which was reviewed by Customer’s senior architect. The offshore team also had the ownership to develop the complete project plans for these modules. These two modules were completed on time and released on the hosted environment. The development team was also assigned the responsibility for maintaining the Supply Chain Event Monitor module, which is being used extensively by the customers. Knowledge transfer happened through Webex sessions, document sharing, mails, and a few exchange visits. Subsequent to this the team was assigned the development of several new modules including CODM, Document Formula, Document Copy, Classification, Auto Number Generation, ITAR, Landed Cost, and Document Versioning. These modules have also been released to the production environment. The India Development team now has complete ownership of Supply Chain Event Monitor, Document Management, Landed Cost, Classification, and Export Compliance modules. The QA team was assigned the responsibility to develop the test plan, test cases, and test data for several important functionalities for the coming releases. They were also made responsible for testing and certifying these functionalities. The QA team was also assigned the task for automating the test data creation using Silk, and also to automate some of the test cases. The QA team also came up with an ingenious solution to load test cases from Excel into test tracker using Silk. The QA team also took over performance testing using Silk Performer. Four Functional Analysts were added to India team. They help the Product Managers in defining the Product Vision and producing Functional Requirement Specifications for the product. Global Trade Content team was also started in India. Customer tracks trade rules and regulations for around 65 countries. India team tracks Trade Rules and Regulations for a host of Asian countries and updates them in the application on day to day basis. Messaging (WebMethods) and Reporting(MicroStrategy and Jasper) resources were added in India to support Customer’s Technical Services Team. . Manufacturing Intelligence Overview: The Customer offers solutions in the space of Manufacturing Intelligence that help manufacturing companies to monitor and improve their productivity, quality and overall equipment efficiency across multiple plants in an enterprise. The Customer’s first product, introduced in 1996, was a desktop based hardware and software solution designed to analyze productivity through cycle time and downtime analysis. We started working with the Customer in 2003, and in the last eight years the product has evolved from being a simple plant solution to a comprehensive enterprise solution, which is being used to introduce lean manufacturing across an enterprise. Customers: Some of the top manufacturers from around the world including Clorox, Unilever, Cargill, Conagra, Merck, Chevron, Johnson & Johnson, Nibco and Celestica are using the Manufacturing Intelligence solutions provided by the Customer. Development Environment: .Net, C#, Visual Basic, MS SQL Server, Analysis Server, Crystal Reports, Graphics Server, Quick TestPro, Mercury Test Director, Visual SourceSafe, Source Offsite Type of Service provided by Metacube: Extended Offshore Engineering Team providing Development and Quality Assurance Services. Duration: Ongoing since May 2003 Peak Team Size: 12+ Distributed Workspace: VPN, Shared source code repository using Visual SourceSafe and Source Offsite, Mercury Test Director, wiki and SharePoint Exchange Visits: Short exchange visits of two to eight weeks were encouraged for the onshore and offshore team to improve coordination and integration. Engagement Overview: The engagement kicked off in May 2003. Knowledge transfer happened through phone calls, instant messaging sessions, emails, and exchange of documents. Before we started the development, the solution was a desktop product. The data from data logger devices was stored in Access Database; and users could view reports on the desktop. The first task for the offshore team was to develop a central server; to which several desktop clients could connect and transfer the data collected from the data logger devices. The central server was developed as a web service using the .Net framework. The second task for the offshore team was to create a web based plant reporting system that could be used to view the reports based on the data in the central server. The next major task was to develop the Quality module; that could be used to analyze the manufacturing defects. Subsequently the offshore team rearchitected the product into an enterprise solution based on hub-spoke architecture supporting multiple plants. The team also developed a new Enterprise Reporting System based on dimensional data model with drillable dashboard that is using Analysis Server in the background. The development team is fully integrated with the onshore team in US; and there is common iteration plan for the onshore and offshore teams. Each iteration consists of 2 weeks. There is practically no distinction in terms of the tasks assigned to the onshore and offshore team, both the teams collaborate on fixing bugs, developing enhancements for existing functionality, and developing new functionality. The team includes members that are dedicated to software testing. These members work on creating manual and automated test cases, executing test cases, and reporting defects. Cloud Consulting Overview: The Customer specializes in offering products and services that help enterprises adopt cloud based platforms and solutions. It has a proven track record of conceiving, architecting, designing and implementing complex, mission-critical enterprise systems based on the cloud paradigm. Areas of expertise include cloud adoption strategies for enterprise, salesforce.com, force.com platform development, Google Apps deployment, and Cloud integration tools. Customers: Customer has helped 150+ enterprises build, implement and manage cloud solutions using a variety of platforms such as salesforce.com, force.com, Google Apps, Workday and Amazon. These enterprises include Thomson Reuters, Facebook, Dolby, Honeywell, Network Solutions, CRC Health Group, VMware and Qualcomm. Development Environment: force.com, VisualForce, Apex, SOQL, Azure, .net, Java Script, HTML, Ajax, JQuery, extJS, Web Services, PHP, Adobe Flex, Amazon SSS and Google API Type of Service provided by Metacube: Extended Offshore Engineering Team providing Development, Quality Assurance and Technical Support Services. Duration: Ongoing since March 2007 Peak Team Size: 60+ Distributed Workspace: VPN, SVN, Google Apps, Salesforce Engagement Overview: Customer was going through the offshore partner selection process when one of their team members gave a strong reference for Metacube. Metacube responded to the vendor selection questionnaire and after a couple of calls and reference checks the Customer decided to go ahead with Metacube as the offshore partner. The engagement was kicked off by Metacube being assigned the task of developing few Google gadgets that would interact with the salesforce.com application. Metacube was new to both salesforce.com and the Google gadget APIs. It took on the challenge and with some guidance from the Customer team was able to successfully develop the gadgets. Metacube was then initiated into a couple of salesforce.com customization and implementation projects. These were again successfully turned around by Metacube. Customer then exposed Metacube to their entire consulting team that is doing slaesforce.com implementation projects, and Metacube team starting interacting with these consultants on one to one basis to partner with them in multiple ongoing projects. Customer has found this model to be highly successful and has expanded the offshore team significantly. Supply Chain Analytics Overview: The Customer was a leading provider of enterprise class software solutions for real-time Supply and Demand Chain execution. The solutions helped create high velocity supply and demand chains through real-time visibility, collaboration, and execution. With these solutions businesses could shorten order cycle times, minimize inventory, and reduce shortages. Customers: Applicable across manufacturing companies in the high technology, medical and consumer markets, the solutions were adopted by industry-leading companies such as Advanced Fibre Communications, Extreme Networks, Juniper Networks, Motorola, Polycom, Leap Frog, Tellabs and net.com. Development Environment: J2EE, Java User Interface (Swing, Struts, Barracuda), EJB, Castor JDO, Jchart, log4j, Jive, Flux, XML Schema, Oracle, WebLogic, Jboss, Junit, HTTP Unit, Ant, Cruise Control, Mercury Test Director, Silk, Perforce. Type of Service provided by Metacube: Extended Offshore Engineering Team providing Development and Quality Assurance Services. Duration: Nov 2002 – July 2005 Peak Team Size: 12+ Distributed Workspace: VPN, Shared source code repository using Perforce, and Mercury Test Director Exchange Visits: Short exchange visits of one to four weeks were encouraged for the onshore and offshore team to improve coordination and integration. Engagement Overview: Managing Director and VP Engineering of Metacube visited Customer Office in Oct 2002 for one week to understand the functionality of the system, architecture, engineering process, and immediate needs for outsourcing. First step was to set up the development environment for the offshore team, which included- VPN connectivity, access to Perforce and Mercury Test Director, synchronizing the code on developer workstations, running local build, and local deployment of the system. Initial set of tasks for the developers was to fix some of the bugs, which gave the opportunity to developers to understand the design and the code. The next set of tasks involved implementing enhancements for the existing functionality. QA team of 2 persons and one more developer were added in February 2003. A complete new Replenishment module was developed by the offshore team from March 2003 to July 2003. The development team got fully integrated with the onshore team in US; and the onshore and offshore teams worked on common iteration plans. The duration of each iteration was 3 weeks. There was practically no distinction in terms of the tasks assigned to the onshore and offshore teams, and both the teams collaborated on fixing bugs, developing enhancements for existing functionality, and developing new functionality. The QA work was handled primarily by the offshore team; except for the QA manager who was located onshore. The QA team developed manual test cases, automated test cases using in house tool developed by the Customer, as well as automated scripts using Silk. The QA team also executed the manual and automated test cases; and defects were tracked on Mercury Test Director. Services team was initiated in Jan 2005. The offshore services team assisted the onshore services team in implementing the solution at client sites.