Case study

Cost Engineering Platform

Highlights

Helps consultants and end-customers in developing competitive products and optimizing investment costs.
Used by some of the largest multinational manufacturers of vehicles from Europe and Asia and multinational telecommunications companies.

Technologies:

.NET, ASP.Net, MVC, CSS3, HTML5, React, TypeScript, MS SQL, TSQL/SQL Server, Azure

Services:

Business Analysis, Software Development, Software Testing, Project Management

7

Team Size

7 Years

Duration

Management Consulting

Industry

Solution

The solution is a complex web-based benchmarking and cost-engineering application initially built for the automotive sector and reengineered for the telecom sector.

It provides purchasing, cost engineering, and development teams with online access to the comparative data and costing tools they need to develop competitively priced vehicles and achieve significant savings in product costs.

Also, cost reduction consultants and R&D teams from both automotive and telecommunication industries can use the platform to estimate production budgets, identify solutions to reduce costs, and compare similar products’ production costs.

The web application and the associated database are hosted in the Azure Cloud.

Collaboration

Our client, a UK-based consultancy company with offices in 8 countries, was developing a leading cost engineering platform for the automotive sector when it approached Fortech.

The consulting firm tasked Fortech to enhance the platform dedicated to reducing production costs. The approach was bidirectional:

maintain (support, bug fixing, minor improvements) and further develop the platform with new features;
re-enginner and adapt it to be used in the telecommunications industry.

Our development team took over the project from the initial crew. Due to a successful collaboration, we now provide the full life cycle development of the platform using Agile methodologies.

As for the second request, the team at Fortech works in an agile manner by using the parts of the scrum framework that work with the fixed price project model. The solution was created for the telecommunication industry by customizing the original one according to telecom-related requirements provided by the end client. The platform is now used by companies in Germany and the UK.

Hosted in an Azure Cloud Service, the application uses a Virtual Machine for the SQL Server instance. Fortech has both the staging and the production environment in Microsoft Azure and is using Azure Virtual Network to have them connected. The deployments are automated using a continuous integration software.

Client Benefits

Long-term Collaboration

Fortech implemented testing procedures and a working methodology

Skilled Team

Ability to fix performance issues caused by the complex architecture of the project