Modernising Monolithic Systems Quickly Using DevOps

Background

Our client is a UK leader in resource management services (RMS) and outsourced recycling services. They help their customers optimise environmental and financial performance. This is a new client for Prolifics; introduced by MuleSoft. RMS chose Prolifics, in part, due to our extensive DevOps expertise and hybrid delivery model.

Challenge

Over the past few years RMS has undertaken a massive business expansion – acquiring many other companies to join their group umbrella. Their forecast for this group of businesses includes continued aggressive growth.

RMS had been using a monolithic legacy application for more than 20 years. While it suited the business well in the past, it has since gone through a number of customisations. It has now reached a state where a simple change – like introducing an additional field – would take three months at considerable expense. So, accommodating growth using the legacy application would mean huge costs, effectively bleeding away their IT budget.

In addition to this lack of agility and accommodation, RMS had a looming, drop-dead renewal date on the legacy license itself – with a huge cost connected to this extension. Also, RMS found itself in the position of having fewer and fewer IT employees knowing how the legacy system operates- they needed to modernise for today’s IT professionals.

RMS decided to replace the monolithic legacy application with Salesforce to enable various APIs and other integrations. They then decided to couple Salesforce and MuleSoft, creating a program of work that included the introduction of Salesforce, MuleSoft and the development of internal applications for internal users – billing, selling and order management.

Action

As with any Prolifics engagement, when we go in, we address the immediate needs while still working on the bigger picture. This means immediate value without a project being held up.

RMS saw the benefit from Prolifics – rather than just providing a group of offshore developers, we could provide the entire package through our hybrid delivery model. This included the local UK team supported by offshore architects and offshore development capabilities.

We conducted an inception phase to understand:

• What used to get done?
• What does the technical landscape look like?
• What is it that needs to be integrated?

In the phases that followed, we built and configured the platform. RMS were excited for us to include all DevOps processing and utilisation of Confluence (a corporate wiki platform) within our work.

Working closely with RMS we configured the platform and built the new environment. RMS wanted to ensure that they could do rapid deployments and manage the platform going forward, correcting one of the original problems of changes taking months.

Throughout the entire engagement with RMS, they had been learning and developing Salesforce at the same time. So, we would come out of phases without a fully signed-off, completed design, because we wanted to facilitate an agile development process.

This agile development model allowed us to accurately meet RMS’ requirements, changing MuleSoft to accommodate their requests.

Result

Prolifics is still currently in the implementation phase, with a “big drop and go live” scenario of MuleSoft, Salesforce and all other business-critical apps going live at one time.

Results can be broken into three groups at this time.

To-date benefits include:

• Overall systems architecture is in place
• Implementation of reference architecture and platform has been set up
• Integration of all apps interacting with legacy system to Salesforce, Azure and AWS cloud using new integration platform
• Documentation of everything in a corporate-based wiki, as well as the MuleSoft platform. RMS can now broaden both the team and the team skillset.

After “go-live,” RMS will have:

• Reduced costs
• API-led connectivity and reusable APIs
• Reduced time managing APIs
• Up to 20 percent time savings for the development of new applications

Prolifics has created the foundation for changes to occur at RMS in a swift and efficient fashion.