Case studies

Farmacias Benavides

Benavides is an organization that competes in the private pharmaceutical market at a national level. Due to the quantity of branches it owns, managing the work processes as well as the relationships with customers and suppliers becomes an essential issue for the company's success.

In order to carry out the managing tasks, Benavides had several distinct applications that did the job. Nevertheless, due to the organization's fast growth, the technological performance of these applications was not good enough to handle the volume and complexity of the activities that were required of them. One of the main problems we identified was the fact that these applications were developed in different platforms and did not communicate with each other. Besides, due to the processes used, users could not get their required information in a reasonable time.

We developed four different applications aimed to cover different functions within the organization. Each one had its own set of requirements, reason why different interviews with the involved responables were made. Later, it was made a redesign of the work processes and business rules used previously with the objective of optimize the exchange of information. Once established the new rules, a new content architecture was designed so we could propose a new structure for the information and a new interface for each application. the project was also used to include new content that adds value to the information retrieved by users.

As to technological development, to archieve communication among the tools, it was necessary to implement a software reengineering which emphasized the redesign and optimization of the development processes, as well as of the applications' programming standards.

As a result of all this reengineering, the following applications were released: a tool to track the status of requests or purchase orders issued by the branches, a tool to manage the information all points of sale of each branch need to operate, a concentrator to integrate the information exchanged between each POS and the central structures, and an application to manage custom-made recipes.