The Client

The Client is a Japan-based company mainly engaged in the mail order business. The Company has three business segments: Finance, Mail order and Direct Sale. The Mail Order segment is engaged in the sale of clothing and daily necessities through catalogs and online stores. The Finance segment is involved in the life insurance business, casualty insurance agency business, credit card business and money lending business. The Direct Sale segment is involved in the sale of jewelry through stores, as well as the sale of undergarments through distributors.

Business Needs

Beginning of 2008, FPT was chosen to be partnered by our client to establish a team focused on creating embedded software solutions and localizing the technical document by translation to Japanese. The Offshore Development center (ODC) is established in June 2008 with 20 people initially, including management, software engineers, test engineers and technical document writers/translators. The ODC is solely dedicated to our client’s projects which operate per SEI CMMI Level 5 compliant processes. The ODC’s mission is to

• Leverage experience with the Japanese market to help Our client’s Japan revenues growth
• Develop embedded software under the direction of our client’s Micro Solution control Group’s R&D department.
• Provide Migration/Porting, Drivers/USB Development, verification & validation testing, Automation of testing suites for all our client’s Automotive products/solutions

Challenges

Initially, even though ODC team has good enough technology background in embedded systems space, team was literally having less experience people in automotive industries solution. Knowledge transfer process is another constraint to take over client’s products localization, development & porting.

Solutions

FPT invited automotive industry experts and conducted special training program for all ODC members to gain automotive solution knowledge. Also, some key resources joined automotive embedded workshop / seminar in Europe to retain industry expertise. Knowledge Transfer process has been conducted in 2 ways, send FPT engineers Onsite to client site for on-job-oriented training, and the other way is FPT team also received training and product knowledge from our client’s expert at our ODC team site in Vietnam. Currently, our client sent a dedicated offshore development manager to work in Vietnam with our ODC team by considering ramping up resources and skill set.

Benefits

Hiring FPT Software is a cost-effective solution which helps the client cut down considerable cost as hiring other IT companies to maintain the online selling system is more expensive. Besides, the selling profit for implementation was raised due to the increase in service charge from high-end users.

Technologies Used

SQL Server 2000 SP3, VSS, Windows 2000, XP, JBuider, Java