Weekly Meeting #36

1. Participants & Attendance

2. Progress Summary

• Two principal outstanding issues to resolve to deliver an MVP for Soft Go-Live. We expect to be able to demonstrate progress on both during next week.

  • Zilliant, supported by BCS, to get the performance of CPQ to an acceptable level

  • BCS to implement margin calculations and summary page

• Some significant improvements in performance in Dev, with further improvements to be implemented and deployed to Test next week

  • Adding a bundle of 400 Product Groups now takes less than 30 seconds, without the margin calculations

  • Adding a bundle of 1,000 Finished Goods still takes around 7 minutes; Zilliant implementing similar optimisations to the PG bundles

  • Margin calculation triggers removed from adding or modifying agreement lines, and all calculations run on Save

• Line level margin calculations completed and summary page in progress

  • One outstanding issue around Drop Cost resolved this week, and being implemented for next week

  • We expect the Margin Summary page to be available for testing from that point

• Some other bugs remain, but the above two items are the main headings to be addressed before Soft Go-Live

3. State of Readiness for Soft Go-Live

Performance

• Outstanding issues last week were the time needed to add large bundles, and the frequency and length of time needed to re-calculate margins. Current status on the time needed to add large bundles in Dev is:

• If it is not necessary to calculate the margin when a bundle is added, then scenarios 2 & 3 can be reduced further down towards 30 seconds.

• Zilliant expect to be able to apply similar optimisations to scenario 4 to those which were already applied to 1-3, and hence achieve similar gains. This will be finalised early next week when their principal engineer returns from leave.

• The margin calculations have been optimised, as can be seen from the gaps in times between scenarios 1 and 3.

• These gains have come from a mixture of enabling API calls to be made for multiple products at once, and from database improvements to speed up the retrieval of the data to be returned.

• To speed up line entry, all margin calculations have been moved to the Save action so that clicking Save now updates the margin calculation and saves the agreement. This optimises line entry performance, but does mean that a user cannot see the margin update until they click Save.

• Subject to satisfactory results and testing in the Dev environment, we expect to release the performance improvements into Test early next week

  • This should allow testing at Valio to proceed at a more normal pace by enabling the team to work with Product Groups again

Margin Calculations and Summary Page

• Calculations for both Finished Goods and Product Group lines have been tested at BCS so far as we can, based on the limited lookup data which was available in CPQ

• The requirements for the Margin Summary page are now finalised, subject to no issues arising in implementation, with one remaining issue around Drop Costs having been resolved this week

• We expect to complete the Margin Summary development this week, and to make it available for testing early next week

Status of Bugs

The number of outstanding bugs continues to show a slight uptick while we work on performance and margin calculations. Note however that some of them have already been resolved in Dev, but because of the optimisation changes currently being implemented in Dev we have not yet been able to push these changes to Test. They will however be available from next week and we expect to be able to reduce the number of outstanding bugs from that point.

Completion of MVP for Soft Go-Live

Soft go-live date remains uncertain while the performance issue remains unsolved. However, if performance can be addressed next week then it seems reasonable to target a completion of UAT by 13th March and a Soft Go-Live on 16th March.

4. Project Timeline

5. Status of Changes

We now have a response from Valio to BCS’s list of changes, and discussions are ongoing.