"Working with Hexacta has been a simple and productive choice. Since the beginning of the project, Hexacta assigned a team that has grown along with us in the application development and business understanding. They made the project progress easy, even in the most difficult time, achieving optimal results. Hexacta has a young and experienced staff of engineers that interpret the needs of the business. We are very pleased with Hexacta´s work. They have proven to be a true business partner."
Israel Victoria - Okidata Mexico, S.A.
Brief description of the company
Okidata Mexico is an international firm that sells printers, including digital color and monochrome printers, serial impact dot matrix printers and multifunction products. As business printing solutions specialists, Okidata provides world-class printing technology and real-world solutions designed to help manage workflow and optimize business performance.
Okidata sells and support their products in more than 18 countries of Latin-American and the Caribbean. It has a network of 25 wholesalers, more than 300 service centers and more than 500 resellers.
The challenge
Okidata Mexico hired Hexacta to develop PPI (Pay for Impression), which is an application that gives support to a new leasing business regarding printing equipment for the Mexican SMEs.
Okidata offers Mexican companies a payment scheme according to the amount of printed pages during a certain period of time, adjusted to their particular needs.
PPI is designed to support all the business processes from capturing data of a potential client, to controlling the number of impressions and the maintenance of the equipment.
Solution
PPI web application was developed under the .NET platform and it consist of different modules to track prospects and clients, create contracts to lease equipment, stock reports, alarms to anticipate toner changing, among others.
Access to information in the database and the business logic of each screen depends on each user’s role within PPI.
PPI architecture is based on a development in layers, it caches information in order to increase efficiency, encrypts data, handles exceptions and sends emails.
PPI has two external modules: one module consists of several alarms, each of them configurable. The other module exports and imports the contract’s payments from and to the client’s bank and the invoicing system.
PPI provides reports using the Active Report tool and uses LinqToSql to manipulate data, allowing to work with information stored in a relational database using the paradigm of object-oriented programming.
The project nowadays is at a maintenance phase with implementation of new functionality. Its current team consists of two developers, a functional analyst and a tester.
Applied technologies
- Presentation Layer: Web Site building with ASP.Net, Microsoft Ajax y JQuery.
- Web Service: Services exposed to external application.
- Alarms: Background process to check the printer’s status.
- Business Layer: Implements all business logic through controllers class. It uses Linq as query language and handle persistence of objects through LinqToSql.
- Domain: Represents all objects handled by the application.
- Exporter / Importer: Used to interact with baks and invoicing systems.
