Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group wanted to enhance its Dollar.com
consumer website to allow customers who join its loyalty program to
get immediate benefits. So it turned to StoneHenge Partners.
The background
A Fortune 1000 company in the travel industry with annual
revenue of $1.7 billion and 1,475 stores in 70 countries, Dollar
Thrifty Automotive Group depends on its consumer websites to
generate nearly half of its sales each year. In 2008, the company
made a strategic decision to enhance customer loyalty to generate a
higher rate of returning customers.
To do this, the company embarked on a web initiative to make it
easier for customers to join, upgrade and manage their
loyalty-program accounts.
The challenge
Dollar needed a software application developed. The goal was,
when a customer enrolls in the company's loyalty program, he would
be issued a membership real-time and be able to use the
benefits immediately.
The challenge was to build a software application that could
receive input from customers through the public-facing website, and
could communicate with multiple internal systems, including a
reservation system, product inventory system, customer data profile
system, and the website's content management system. These systems
were not integrated; some had two-way web-service APIs in
standardized XML format, while others allowed only one-way
batch-processing data files in proprietary formats.
The company turned to StoneHenge Partners.
The solution
StoneHenge Partners architected, designed, developed, tested and
deployed a module integrated into the website's Content Management
system.
The project was scoped, monitored and managed through Function
Point Analysis. It contained 146 function points, grouped into 3
iterations, requiring a total of 2,044 hours to design, develop,
test, deploy, and hand off to the client.
To see the benefits of Function Point Analysis at work, download
this project's Function
Point Analysis Scope Matrix [PDF, 1.2MB] and a
Project
Development Rate Statistics report [PDF, 1.0MB].
The results
User requirements were captured and a Functional Size
Traceability Matrix was developed in January, 2008. Development
began on 2/29/2008 and was code-complete on 5/6/2008. The
results:
- Each of the three iterations hit its milestone to the day.
- Along the way, 17 new function points were discovered and
rolled into the project, while two obsolete function points were
deleted, with no loss of momentum.
The project was delivered on time, as promised, and the project
came in slightly under budget.
"Function Point Analysis provided an accurate timeline, enabling
the project to reach its delivery date even with changes
mid-stream," said Tony Ray, Dollar Thrifty Director of Internet
Marketing Technology & Operations. "The detailed
analytics required for Function Points also allowed our (internal)
IT to understand what StoneHenge was building, which was very
effective at handoff," when StoneHenge Partners turned over the
source code to Dollar's internal staff for operation and
maintenance.
Ray said he was surprised at the level of detailed questions
asked up front, but he said it paid off later.
"Function Points exposed the product at a really granular level,
which gave the business unit the ability to understand what they're
asking for. That way, they could streamline items," removing the
'nice-to-haves,' he said, "to get the product to market
faster."