challenge: A multinational company known for its consumer brands had outsourced development of its Enterprise Resource Planning system upgrade, which had been delivered, accepted, and used for seven months before it was discovered that the system did not comply with one of its stated requirements, the ability to handle several hundred concurrent sessions. The system owner complained that the software needed reworking, while the software developers countered that the problem could only be resolved with a hardware upgrade. Since either solution would entail significant expense for one party or another, CheQ was brought in to identify the real source of the problem and determine the most appropriate strategy.

solution: Since the system was already in production, testing activities were performed at night. These involved simulation of real operation scenarios while monitoring every component of the system, including both hardware and software. Test results showed significant reductions in performance of firewall components while processing orders and server authentication under heavy loads.

result: In just three nights, we were able to identify and isolate the bottleneck areas that were causing system issues. This led to a resolution of the problem that did not require too much resource expenditure or additional investment, and, most importantly, preserved the long term relationship between customer and supplier. Both the multinational company and the software developers have since retained CheQ’s services for third party testing.