USA

importantly , there was much more collaboration between IT and the business units . “ For example , the notion of going to the cloud became a much simpler discussion because they felt comfortable and they had confidence that we can deliver what we promised and that it would work ,” Hemmady says . “ The exercise also gave us the confidence to expand the use of agile scrum methodology across the board and increase the degree of software development initiatives .” Nevertheless , until the first product was launched , even the board remained anxious . After a year of phased development and release OptiLink , the self-service supply chain portal on which OIA customers now place their orders , was launched without a glitch . It has since replaced two of five difficult to upgrade and costly to maintain legacy systems and on a roadmap to retire the rest . “ We can now easily deploy OptiLink

for new customers , giving them the supply chain and inventory visibility they require ,” Hemmady adds .

Over the development period , the spadework of development was gradually distributed between the USA , UK , Ukraine and India . “ In addition to delivering software development , I was able to encourage us to look offshore with a twofold purpose . One is to decrease the time to market by using the timezones effectively , and the other one , of course , is the lower cost of ownership .” For freight forwarding , his teams are now developing OIA Connect , another selfservice portal that allows OIA to present its own and its clients ’ data on a single web portal . “ Freight forwarding , for example , represents a significant portion of our revenue and profit is operational on a package called CargoWise One from the Australian application software specialist Wisetech Global .”

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