Brief description of the company
Lucaioli is a company with headquarters located in Bahía Blanca dedicated to the sale of household items. It has nearly 50 years of history and leads its field in central and southern Argentina. The company has over 40 branches and over 1000 employees.
The challenge
Lucaioli had a “Retail Point of Sale” system, completely developed in Cobol in 1985.
The IT department detected that they needed to renew their technological platform due to new business requirements, the opening of new branches and the increasing volume of transactions on POS applications.
Solution
New functionalities included: Budgets, Invoicing, Loans Management (for buying products), Inventory, Clients Management, Technical Support and other administrative tasks such as Payments, deposits, petty cash, and so on.
Hexacta provided a development team in our offices in Bahía Blanca in order to keep the team close and take advantage of the geographical distance.
Some of the key success factors were:
- Processes reengineering: creation of budgets for clients and enterprises, improved loans management, alarms and several levels of authorizations for some key processes, in order to have a better tracking of client’s activities.
- Merging Client’s databases: having a unique database in headquarters offices, which could store historical information from branches. Branches had to be able to continue working even if their internet connection was not available.
Migrating historical data into new database was a great challenge. The goal was to extract data from Cobol databases and merge it to meet the client’s requirements and business rules. - The UI was designed in a way that helped and facilitated the user’s learning experience regarding the new system features. It was necessary to keep some of the old keyboard shortcuts and some of the most popular navigation flows of the old system, as well as implementing best practices on usability.
Hexacta has accompanied Lucaioli on deploying the solution in several branches
APPLIED TECHNOLOGIES
- Winform
- NHibernate
- SqlServer
- CastleWindsor
- .Net Framework 4.0