Augmenting internal development teams to accelerate project delivery

Client

The 2M Group of Companies focuses on delivering high-quality chemistry-based solutions that make lives healthier today and better tomorrow. The group maintains a portfolio of material & life science companies, which includes CE-02, Banner Chemicals, Ingretech, MP Storage & Blending, Packed Chlorine, SampleRite, Stowlin & Surfachem.      

The 2M group was started in Runcorn, England, in 2004 and has been expanding globally ever since. Today, the group exports to 90 countries, and has sites in Benelux, Brazil, China, France, Germany, Ireland, Poland and the Nordic region.

Background 

One of 2M’s subsidiaries had an existing system called Certification of Authenticity, that was used for certifying the authenticity of chemicals that were purchased by customers. A customer would purchase the chemicals that they required and the system would then generate a pdf that provided them with validation and visibility of their purchase. 

At the time, this system only existed in one of the 2M’s subsidiaries. There was a growing demand for a similar validation system to exist across 2M’s other subsidiaries. 

With the new system, all relevant data about the chemicals purchased and the entire sale would be collected into an accessible pdf — accompanied by the relevant company branding according to which subsidiary the deal was carried out with. 

While this action was a priority for the company, much of their internal development team was assigned to other longstanding, internal projects. 2M, therefore, required a software development company who was able to oversee this project and provide development, support and advice where required. Someone who could augment their development capacity and help with this high priority project. 

Audacia had previously served as 2M’s software development provider on a project to maintain multiple core business systems and external public-facing websites for some of their other subsidiaries. The success of this project encouraged 2M to reach out to Audacia and continue their partnership. Following this initial contact, 2M collaborated with Audacia to detail business processes, workflows, and logic. 

The objective of the project was to extend the CoA system to support two of 2M’s subsidiaries. These two new systems would work in much the same manner to the existing system, but would have different user design to align with the relevant companies' branding. 

Solution 

2M worked in partnership with Audacia as part of a team augmentation project to successfully roll out two, new rebranded applications for Ingretech and Crafted. The team augmentation enabled Audacia developers to work closely with 2M's in-house developers on the project and ensure that the project objectives were consistently met.    

For this project, few changes to the code were required since the core functionality remained the same; to validate orders of chemicals and produce a pdf certification. However, the applications on the front-end were rebranded according to the company database that extracted data from. 

A key complexity for this project was how the systems would pull the relevant data from the two companies’ ERP and CRM databases, which were unique. Audacia leveraged Azure Data Factory to successfully manage the secure transfer of all data. 

DataFactory allowed Audacia and 2M to handle and validate the data that was being transferred from Ingretech and Crafted individual databases. This meant that the data from the subsidiaries could be successfully transferred and accessed by users. The tool was especially useful for 2M and its subsidiaries, who were dealing with large amounts of data pertaining to various chemical types. 

Results 

Across their group of companies 2M are getting consistency of user experience, as well as consistency of approach. Customers across the different subsidiaries can now purchase products with the confidence that their items are certified. 

With the new system, users can easily select which subsidiary they belong to and access the system. Once this has been configured, the system is then branded as that subsidiary. It is from here that the system can pull through the configuration and determine which databases to extract information.

The success of the project has also created a playbook for further acquisitions; 2M and Audacia have defined an approach that could allow the company to successfully rollout rebranded applications in the future.