PowerDesigner allows us to fully benefit from offshore resources for decision-making projects.
Philippe Courbouleix
Accenture is a global management consulting, technology and outsourcing company. Combining its experience, expertise, research and innovation capabilities, Accenture collaborates with the largest organizations in the world, spanning all industries and types of business. Accenture helps its clients, companies and governments, to strengthen its performance with the help of Sybase technology. With over 190,000 employees working in over 120 countries, the company generated revenue of US $21.58 billion during the last fiscal year.
Accenture used PowerDesigner to build a single data model and structure an international project team for a large French industrial group.
As part of a broader effort to reorganize and standardize its computer systems, a large French industrial group used Accenture’s expertise to renew its decision support system. The challenge of this overhaul was both technical and business-related. The IT department saw the project’s main purpose as increasing responsiveness and reducing support and maintenance costs by pooling its systems. Conversely, the business sector’s goal was to harmonize the concepts and indicators and improve data quality. To meet this dual challenge, Accenture structured and industrialized its project with PowerDesigner (known as PowerAMC in France), Sybase’s modeling and metadata management tool.
Inherited from years of previous developments, the existing system was composed of many applications which were often poorly documented. Adding to the problem, the project team was distributed throughout five continents, with Accenture’s main development resources based in India. To meet tight deadlines despite the technical and organizational complexity, Accenture used an industrialized approach known as “build one, deploy many.” In this approach, a single modular model was first developed before being progressively rolled out, while being enriched with adaptations by functional area, geographic zone or product.
During the design phase of the unified data model, the Accenture team realized that one of the main obstacles would be recovering the existing elements of the system, since few of the company’s applications were updated in the existing documentation. However, this challenge was met through PowerDesigner’s reverse engineering capability, allowing the team to reconstruct the data structure from the elements of production. In other cases throughout the system, documentation existed but was scattered in the form of description of models and rules in office documents. Using PowerDesigner in an innovative and effective way, a small Visual Basic application was written to read these documents and automatically input the information into PowerDesigner. The broad functionality of PowerDesigner allowed for easy development of a shared technical and functional repository for this French industrial company, which helped structure and streamline the performance of the project.
Capitalizing its success with this French industrial company, Accenture has now integrated PowerDesigner into its approach for delivery of decision-making solutions for many other organizations. At the design stage, the automation of many tasks (quality review, impact analysis, production of data models, creation and customization of deliverables, etc.) offers significant productivity and quality gains. And, designed for collaboration, PowerDesigner becomes a platform for centralizing and sharing information for the entire project team. “By helping to eliminate the organizational problems and quality defects, PowerDesigner allows us to take full advantage of offshore resources for decision-making projects,” concludes Philippe Courbouleix, senior manager at Accenture.
POWERDESIGNER
An enterprise modeling and design solution that helps you implement effective enterprise architecture.