Global Financial Planning, ERP Products, and Offshoring

Würth Phoenix, a software company of Würth corporation, has used UltraLightClient for its commercial ERP product Sylvestrix, and the Würth-internal Company Information System (CIS). The latter is an application for financial planning and controlling that is used globally by 300 subsidiaries of Würth. Sylvestrix is a merchandise management system that supports

  1. purchasing and merchandise planning,
  2. order processing,
  3. logistics,
    4. and
  4. reporting and statistics.

Würth Phoenix has developed these applications with a highly interesting Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) and an offshoring approach, where an architecture team in Italy built the MDA environment and a team in China realized the applications. UltraLightClient’s built-in client/server split, J2EE integration and flexible deployment options are key enablers of this MDA environment, offering proven solutions for issues that typically lead to problems in offshoring projects. See also Peter Leitner’s article in Java Developer’s Journal.

Requirements

  • Rich UIs combined with Internet technology.
  • Proven architecture and infrastructure that adds value to MDA framework used for offshore development.
  • Deployment of applications on widely diverse infrastructures, in ASP configurations, within Intranets, and stand-alone.

Key Benefits

  • The combination of rich UIs and Internet technology are a key selling proposition of the applications.
  • Platform independence and flexible deployment options allowed rollout of CIS to 300 companies in widely diverse configurations: based on a single code base, the application runs on virtually all versions of Linux, Windows, and Solaris, in client/server configuration and stand-alone, over the Internet and within company Intranets.
  • Built-in client/server split and J2EE integration are a bonus for the MDA environment that is used for offshoring.