High Technology

Overview
A global company manufactures and sells networking and communications products and associated services. Its products and services help customers build their own network infrastructures and provides tools to allow them to communicate with key stakeholders, including customers, prospects, business partners, suppliers and employees.

Business Need
The client wanted a focused service group to provide a wide range of services, including application development, maintenance, support and QA with good response times for its Japanese subsidiary. In order to leverage its global workforce, the client also needed to identify opportunities to IT-enable its business processes. The client required end-to-end application development services (Requirements gathering, analysis through implementation and support).

Challenges and Requirements
The Infosys team had to meet the following challenges:

• The total cost of ownership for IT was steep. Infosys had to trim this down to reduce operational costs
• IT systems had to be put in place to enable the client to leverage its global workforce and since the client had thousands of employees, Infosys had to develop a solution which would take the associated factors into consideration.
• Infosys also had to ensure that its complete project could deliver major financial breakthroughs for the client and minimize the delivery cycle time.
• Care had to be taken to ensure that the unique features of the Japanese language are properly handled. Infosys had to determine alternate multibyte standards for processing the complicated Japanese characters.
• Defect control was priority for the client and a near zero error tolerance was required. The Infosys team had to achieve this in spite of the complexities concerning coding for the Japanese language.

Infosys Role
Leveraging the time tested Global Delivery Model, the Infosys team, consisting of four members onsite in Japan and nine in Bangalore delivered the applications, including the Japanese customizations, within 11 months.

The team started by studying the client's processes and identified areas for IT-enablement. Detailed analysis support and maintenance for the existing applications in Japan, concerning marketing, sales and HR, were covered as part of the project.

One of the biggest challenges before the Infosys team concerned the inherent complexities of the Japanese language, which meant that the standards used for English were not applicable here. To handle this problem, the team relied on MBCS (Multi-Byte Character Set). MBCS allows both one byte and two byte characters with overlapping possibility of lead and trail byte values, requiring knowledge of context.

The Infosys team handled this problem with the help of multilingual language experts, who held special classes to train the team to handle the complex Japanese code sets.

The Japanese language complexity apart, the coding progressed smoothly on the Java Struts framework, which was used for the application development. The project management and communication skills ensured that the client was fully aware of the efforts taken to ensure complete project fructification.

Benefits and Outcome
The Infosys solution delivered the following benefits:

• Numerous independent systems existed before Infosys started the project. Infosys created a one-stop shop for managing various areas such as new releases, events, reward points, and online training and certifications information. This resulted in cost savings by eliminating existing independent systems.
• Shorter Response time for PC renting process.
• Closer understanding of business processes has led to continuous, incremental changes.
• Infosys developed numerous applications, and one of which enabled sending messages over Internet Protocol (IP) phones.
• The client's stringent quality standards were completely adhered to and the number of defects detected was almost close to zero.