Case Study

PDI Delivers Better Software Faster

with MKS’s Unified ALM Platform
“MKS Integrity is a complete, integrated, ALM solution that allows
PDI to spend our energy sharpening the saw instead of spinning the
wheels. Since we put MKS Integrity in place, we’ve completely elimi-
nated costly configuration management-related release recalls, saving
18 person-months of effort over the last three quarters.”
Earl Milam, VP Application Development, Professional Datasolutions, Inc. (PDI)

Company Overview The Challenge

Professional Datasolutions, Inc. (PDI)
provides software, hardware and
professional services to convenience
retailers and wholesale petroleum
marketers. Worldwide, over 350 compa-
nies managing 23,000 retail locations rely
on PDI’s systems for retail automation,
fuel and warehouse management, busi-
ness intelligence, financial reporting, and
employee selection and training. They
specialize in business process automation
for geographically distributed chains and
wholesale fuel distribution. To better
enable their customers, PDI helps them:
centralize management of distributed
sites; further enable their e-business
capabilities; enhance their fuel chain
supply and inventory management auto-
mation, and control Point-Of-Sale (POS)
systems.
The PDI solution is software-intensive.
Evolving into the success they are today
(with few controls on the software devel-
opment process) worked well until this
point. Now, with numerous customers,
numerous product lines, more sophisti-
cated technologies in the solution stack,
increasing competition, and accelerating
customer demands for quality and fea-
tures, business is more challenging than
ever. The need for process modernization
and lifecycle automation was becoming
clearer each week.
PDI’s old development environment was
the typical ‘mess of many’ scenario, char-
acterized by numerous, disconnected,
first-generation, point-product-based
tools, none of which communicated well
with each other. As is all too common,
these tools were cobbled together by
esoteric manual processes and brittle
home-built integrations – one missed
keystroke or a forgotten step and it could
take days-to-weeks to recover.
PDI’s Objective
PDI wanted to deliver the right product
in time to meet market needs, with as
few bugs as possible, while remaining
profitable. PDI’s product development
strategy focuses on their customers’
feature request priorities; limiting large
upgrades to once or twice per year; and,
ensuring that they respond quickly to
customer issues.
Accordingly, PDI processes hundreds of
change requests monthly. As competi-
tion intensified, the need to automate
and control these changes became even
more critical.
1 | PDI Case Study
Case Study
Professional Datasolutions Inc.
The Solution
Can you Afford Yesterday’s
Inefficiencies Given Today’s Reality?
PDI decided to evaluate potential solu-
tions. Accurev, Serena, McCabe, IBM/
Rational, Microsoft’s Team Foundation
Suite, and MKS, were just some of the
vendors that they looked at. Recognizing
that this would be an enterprise-wide
shift that could have significant impact on
the business if unsuccessful, PDI wanted
not just great technology, but also a
vendor, a partner really, that they could
count on to be responsive and supportive;
a company whose corporate culture was
well aligned with their own and that could
lead them to a better place.
2 | PDI Case Study
PDI was not going to make this decision
lightly; they were betting the business
on a 10 year plan so they had to make the
right choice.
After an in-depth round of evaluations,
PDI selected MKS as their unified ALM
solution provider for:
> Comprehensive ALM solution with a
unified data model
> Flexible, powerful and easy-to-learn
user interfaces; a minimal learning curve
> Rapid, easy migration, implementation
and evolution
> A lower total cost of ownership
The MKS ALM solution also provided a
secure, robust, and flexible staging and
deployment capability, allowing PDI to
have confidence that their biggest head-
ache, faulty releases, would go away.
To support the initial implementation,
MKS brought in one of their local partners.
Novus Solutions Group is a professional
services firm specializing in compliance,
business and software process consulting,
ALM best practices and ALM solution
implementation.
Working together, MKS and Novus
completed the implementation of PDI’s
tailored MKS solution in four weeks. Novus’
deep consultative experience coupled
with MKS’ ALM thought leadership were
instrumental in the swift rollout of the
ALM automation solution. PDI recog-
nized that the partnership between MKS
and Novus was a strong one and that the
corporate culture of both organizations
was a perfect match to their own. The
MKS team’s responsiveness and reliabil-
ity was a comfort to PDI; knowing they
could count on them was a cornerstone
of their decision.
The Results
PDI’s MKS-Integrity-Driven Platform
The MKS Integrity solution provided PDI
with an automated, streamlined way to
collect enhancements, bugs, and change
requests. PDI is able to work against a
change request and track it through
different configurations automatically.
This allowed for true Software Change
and Configuration Management (SCCM).
These two ALM disciplines must be tightly
linked in today’s world of collaboration,
when time-to-market, productivity,
quality, and compliance all matter. End-
to-end traceability of this type was the
precise elixir for PDI’s ailment– it ensured
that change requests could be tracked,
prioritized, worked, slated for a release,
and that the source code associated with
those change requests actually made it
into the desired release.
The MKS team had the entire organization
of 50+ people up and running in 4 weeks.
This led to improved code review process,
no faulty releases, eliminated home-grown
tools and errors that they introduced, and
resulted in savings of a minimum of 18
person-months of effort over the first
three quarters after implementation.
The automated development process
approach dramatically simplifies their
software change and release process,
offering easy configuration of repeatable,
highly-automated builds and releases.
The number of returned releases, and
the workload associated with repairing
them, has fallen to zero. PDI’s customers
are now benefiting from the rapid turn-
around times they now experience and
the robustness of the updated products.
PDI has plans to add requirements and
test management capabilities to their
solution, extending the end-to-end
reach of their lifecycle automation and
the value it delivers. With MKS Integrity
in place, PDI is confident that they can
capture new change requests; readily
prioritize them; assign them out for
development; “virtualize” and automate
code reviews; assign specific change
requests to specific releases; and make
progress knowing that nothing would
“fall through the cracks” and that real-time
project status is just a mouse-click away.
Benefits
While solving their main issue, ensuring
accurate releases, PDI is now experiencing
many additional benefits, among them:
> No more release recalls with the
“backfill” detection. Being able to trace
the dependencies is a great benefit. Now
their developers are able to understand
the relationship between code changes
made in one development path, and
choose whether or not to include those
changes in a new development path.
> By eliminating the error-prone custom
integration tools that became problem-
atic, it allowed their development team
to be more efficient in completing their
tasks.
> Code reviews are now conducted vir-
tually. The proper reviewers are notified
when changes are ready and they can
assess work from the efficiency of their
own desk.

Automated support for all software “With its ease of implementation, ability to evolve over time, and
development activities through a single
MKS’s dedication to customer success, we were confident that MKS
enterprise application allowed PDI to
remove many manual steps from their was a solution that we could bet the business on.”
process, resulting in higher quality
Earl Milam, VP Application Development, Professional Datasolutions, Inc. (PDI)
releases, faster, and with less effort. This
allows PDI to have faith in their release
content and confidence that they are
delivering high quality products.

3 | PDI Case Study

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