CMS Transport dramatically reduces time-to-deployment by 80% after implementing Roundtable TSMS, allowing the Australian transport and logistics solutions provider to dedicate more time to evolving their product and producing client customizations.
CMS Transport Systems developed its first fully integrated transport management system in 1978 for one of Australia’s largest transport and logistics groups. Since then, they have evolved into a leading software company focused on developing mission critical solutions that deliver tangible benefits to large businesses operating in Australia’s diverse freight industry.
To fulfill their business goal of delivering a solution on time to a dynamic industry where customizations and enhancements are a regular occurrence, it became essential for CMS Transport Systems to accelerate productivity and decrease time to market, while maintaining high quality control.
Andrew Power, CMS Transport Systems Manager of Software Development for two decades, understood the importance of finding a solution that would meet the requirements of their development environment – not simply a version control tool but a solution that would be instrumental in managing the entire software development lifecycle from development to deployment.
CMS Transport Systems was without any software configuration management solution and found themselves too reliant on manual processes, particularly in the area of promotions. Moving software changes through the lifecycle involved manually copying source code and using external tools to apply schema changes to the target environment. Developers relied on handwritten notes to determine which programs they had changed or were impacted by a change. Power recalls, “It was very manual, very tedious, and prone to a lot of mistakes. With Roundtable, life is much different.”
CMS Transport Systems choose Roundtable® Total Software Management System (TSMS) to help them gain greater control over these processes. As the leading Software Configuration Management solution for Progress OpenEdge® development, Roundtable TSMS already anticipated and addressed their application lifecycle needs.
“Although we looked at other products in the past, we could not see the advantage of a product that was not able to manage our entire application, including source code and database schema. Of all of the products we looked at (including open source solutions), nothing could adequately manage schema changes. It was a major benefit for us to be able to keep the schema and source code changes together and move them from development to test environments as one unit.” Power continues, “The fact that Roundtable did everything we required was its biggest selling point.”
Prior to implementing Roundtable TSMS, CMS Transport Systems found managing deployments of their application to be a time-consuming process. They had a mechanism where they would copy the source code from production into a customer copy, then apply any schema changes by just comparing production to the customer’s version, compile the software, and then send it to the customer’s site and cross their fingers.
“It would sometimes be the case that a change didn’t make it into the deployment,” Power says. Then, it “was only apparent once it was deployed onsite and the customer had tried to use the software and it didn’t work.”
Now, CMS Transport Systems has attained a high level of confidence in their software by utilizing Roundtable TSMS’s deployment tools. They know that a deployment works because its changes have been promoted through the full lifecycle. Power is extremely pleased that Roundtable TSMS makes the entire process considerably easier. He says, “Where deployment used to require a minimum of a half a day to an entire day, now we can complete the process in a half hour or less, depending on the size of the deployment. It is a very straightforward process. Conservatively, the time cut in deployment alone is at least 80%.”
With the substantial time savings from deployment alone, CMS Transport Systems can now devote more time to the testing process, enabling them to avoid the post-deployment issues of the past. “Now our customers have much greater confidence in the quality of the deployments,” Power says. “The benefits of Roundtable go beyond mere time savings.”
As the transportation and logistics industry embraces new and exciting ways to do business, CMS Transport Systems’ Freight 2020 continues to evolve to meet those needs. “We have a lot of customizations going on all the time. The fact that we are continually moving software through the system and into production and out to customers makes the time savings multiply,” Power remarks of Roundtable TSMS. “We couldn’t imagine going back. It makes us wonder how we got by for as long as we did without it.”
For more information about Roundtable TSMS, Software Configuration Management for Progress OpenEdge development, contact Roundtable sales or visit www.roundtable-software.com.
