Belay Integration Services has been actively involved for the past 12 months in transforming and developing the systems of the Furniture Bargaining Council (FBC) to increase the productivity of its staff and to improve on its service delivery to the members of the furniture, bedding, upholstery and curtain manufacturing industry.
Belay's involvement with the FBC started in early 2007 when the FBC needed help to improve the performance of their fund management system. Performance optimisation on a Microsoft SQL Server environment has always been one of Belay's core strengths. This led to an engagement where the FBC contracted Belay to assist them to make significant enhancements to the fund management system, specifically with reference to their monthly returns capturing and receipting processes.
In conjunction with the FBC, Belay decided to use Microsoft's Team Foundation Server (TFS) as the development environment with Visual Studio 2008. Due to the FBC's urgent need to dramatically improve the productivity of their staff and reduce overtime, as well as make a significant difference in the level of service the council provides to the industry, TFS was used to successfully implement an agile development methodology. The project kick-off was done in January 2008, and with the agile processes the FBC staff started using the Belay system in early April 2008. Traditionally a system with same level of complexity would have taken 18 months of development before the first release to a live environment could occur. The agile process involves doing regular releases of smaller components, to quickly show value for the client's investment.
The FBC has seen a significant decrease in the turnaround time for their capturing process. An annual Holiday Bonus Fund payout is executed during November and December of each year. Extensive development and integrity tests made to the existing system proved to be highly successful despite the time constraints. During this process, the cheque-writing module as developed by Belay produced some 21 000 cheques and employee statements as well as 21 000 Provident Fund statements.
The secretariat of FBC has confirmed the system developed by Belay for the council to be extremely user friendly and has been developed as per the council's requirements.
The dynamic nature of the bargaining council will require ongoing changes to their systems and the new system has already proven itself to be robust in handling any changes to the industry's collective agreement.
For further information, please contact Pieter Kruger: tel 011 318 1244, fax 011 318 1243, e-mail pieter@belay.co.za
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