Improving Services

The client US-based Service Corporation International Inc. (www.sci-corp.com) is a leading death care services company that operates nearly 3,100 funeral homes, cemeteries and crematoria in North America, France and South America. It generates more than $2.5 billion in revenues.

SCI has several software applications for cemetery operations, funeral home operations, pre-need funerals funded by trusts and insurance, and management reporting. It needed a solution that could integrate its features into a single web application.

A client-server, Powerbuilder-based solution developed by HMIS Inc. met SCI’s needs of integrated features. Infosys (www.infosys.com) provided IT consulting services to SCI and proposed to build the web version of the HMIS product for SCI, which was looking at annual IT savings of over $4 million. So, the project had to demonstrate business benefits and meet performance application expectations of the client, which was new to Infosys and to outsourcing to India. Infosys proposed to build a proof-of-concept (POC). The idea was to give the client a glimpse into the production version of the web application and mitigate technology risks involved in complex migration. The broad objectives of the POC were:

• Meet stringent performance and scalability requirements under low bandwidth conditions.
• Derive a technical architecture of a lower TCO web-based application that will eventually replace
  all current thick client and first generation web applications.
• Create a capacity-planning document for hardware and software investments required over the next 
  
  few years.

The solution 

Infosys engaged Microsoft Consulting Services to participate in the architecture and design of the .NET application, and to provide inputs on performance tuning and handling of very large databases with an SQL Server. The POC covered 20% of the functionality and 80% of the non-functional complexity of the “future state” web application.

The scope of the project was to mitigate risks involved in mapping client/server features to the web-based solution. So, a set of infrastructure and common application blocks were built. Development best practices were used to implement the solution.

The Infosys team’s approach included definition of the following components of the future-state application:

• Application architecture: The team developed a set of framework components and application blocks, which implement the best practices for .NET framework languages. This ensured that all the components of the solution met the application’s performance, scalability, security, reliability and availability metrics.
• System architecture: The team then defined the external interfaces that the application would expose to integrate with partner and customer solutions. The POC demonstrated integration with third-party solutions such as Omniform and
  Documentum.
• Infrastructure architecture: To provide SCI with realistic hardware and software requirements, the POC was subjected to rigorous performance testing for tuning the application. The output of these tests was used for the capacity planning exercise that included calculation of future-state application
  TCOs

The advantage

During the POC, Infosys was able to generate 10 hits per second on a 2-CPU box with rich screens. After successfully executing the POC, Infosys was involved in full application migration. Phase-I of the project has been developed and is currently under implementation at SCI.

The $2.5 billion US-based SCI Inc. wanted a solution that could integrate its
several applications for cemetery operations, funeral home operations, pre-need
funerals funded by trusts and insurance, etc, into a single web application. And
Infosys not only gave SCI quality work and lower cost billings but also the
benefits of its CMM Level 5 processes