"Galaxy" Project for Sodexo Group

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Client

Sodexo Remotes Sites.

Brief description of the company

Sodexo Remotes Sites is a member of the Sodexo Group, with operations in 79 countries, 313.000 employees and more than 11.500 MM euros in turnover.

It offers approximately 40 services, from technical maintenance to entertainment, health care, garbage collection and water treatment. Sodexo operates internationally and specializes in providing these services in difficult operating environments.

Its clients are “blue chip” companies from the oil & gas, construction and mining industries, with projects in remote places.

Problem

Until recently, Sodexo Remotes Sites used to operate with diverse technological decentralized platforms, ignoring the global nature of its business. These applications (Excel, Access and other similar solutions) did not allow consistent management of operations across the clients’ geographies.

Once they decided that improving the technological platform of the company was a high priority issue, Sodexo Remotes Sites launched the Galaxy project with the goal of simplifying the operations through the use of a new tool. This tool would formalize the supply chain process that was common to different locations, supporting the multi-services strategy of the firm and generating a global vision of its operations.

Due to the successful experience in other projects of the Sodexo Alliance and their knowledge of the .Net platform, Sodexo Remotes Sites decided to work with Hexacta to develop this new platform.

Solution

In May 2004 Hexacta began to work in this project.  By the end of April 2005, Galaxy was already installed in Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, Angola, Romania and the United States.
All phases of the project followed the RUP methodology. The provided services included requirements specification, coding, testing, training and deploying the solution (Hexacta staff traveled several times to the U.S. for training purposes).

Finally, several sub-products of the development were adopted as “best practices” by Sodexo Remotes Sites.

Applied Technologies

The application operates with three different technologies, all of them based in .Net framework: a client/server solution built over Winforms, a mobile version for warehouse users and a web reporting applications suite for management purposes.

Galaxy is designed to address the business needs of users who will often not be able to be connected to the central application. Therefore, a mechanism was designed to work off-line and sync later when connected.