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Overview GIO-ES (Global Infrastructure Organisation - European Services) is the European IT infrastructure subsidiary of Unilever. The scale of its operations is such that the process of project request, assessment, approval and development must be formally controlled. A process for controlling projects had been developed by Unilever and IBM. Village Software Engineering Limited worked with an in-house team to develop an Intranet application to control this project workflow. 
Return on Investment The Project Request Management system has open at any time over 300 projects, with a budget cost of £8 Million. For this reason, Unilever has made a considerable investment with IBM in developing processes to reliably manage this work. It is these processes (Property of IBM and Unilever) that are implemented by this project. GIO-ES is part of a strategic consolidation of Unilever's IT infrastructure. The successful implementation of this system allows the momentum of growth of GIO-ES to continue while keeping projects under control. For a relatively small sum Village has helped GIO-ES develop a system on an Intranet that allows rapid deployment within GIO-ES and Unilever. Solution The customer chose an intranet based solution and had example page layouts and a detailed procedure book that was to be supported in the system. The importance of the system led to Oracle being selected as the core technology. The architecture used gave a means of providing a secure, reliable and testable solution. Village developed the solution alongside an in-house team. In addition to its own resources, the Village team was supplemented with ASP/VBScript programmers from Sentient Consulting Limited. Development documentation and repeatable module testing scripts were an important part of the product. This ensured that the system developed could be relied upon and it allowed the control of quality as new features and structures were added in phase 2 of the development. 
Technology Village was originally asked to provide the Oracle Architecture to a development in Cold Fusion. However the customer's Cold Fusion suppliers were not able to provide the resources in the necessary time frame. Village used its industry contacts to assemble a suitable team to develop the systems front end in Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP). 
Oracle provides a sophisticated platform to develop heavy-duty systems. It's full feature user security and the tight connection of its internal programming language (PL/SQL) allow for robust applications to be written. Village developed a system architecture that provided a service in which every user had a different portfolio of projects they had access to and roles they could undertake with those projects. Similarly a set of business rules ensures that each project under development can only follow the defined workflow paths. All system control and updates are contained in the Oracle code. ASP provided a much lighter development environment. With the solid base of the Oracle half of the system in place, it was very suitable to rapidly develop a user interface that worked on Unilever's intranet. An Intranet solution of this type has zero footprint on a users computer, this allowed a rapid roll out of the system to the users and for continuing development and enhancements to be rapidly deployed. Alternative technologies could have been used. On this occasion Oracle was clearly the best solution for a back end database however Village could have developed solutions in SQL Server, Interbase or PostgreSQL. Any scripting language could have been used. Village uses ASP/VBScript and PERL as scripting languages. A more sophisticated web development environment could have been used developing the web services in C++ Builder or Visual Basic. This would have been necessary if a less sophisticated database was used. Cost This is a large system with a complex architecture and a large number of complex forms. A development of this type and scale costs around £100,000. A smaller system with similar technologies might start at £7,500 for a basic application linking to a back end system. Customer Comment "Your professionalism and high quality of work has been noted and appreciated. We look forward to working with you into the future". Andrew Davies
GIO-ES Process Implementation Manager |
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Apr 2008 
