Case Study - LastMinute.com
The Product
LastMinute.com were upgrading their lastminute travel, entertainment and hotels "business to consumer" website from Windows to Unix (Sun Solaris, Oracle and Java).The Problem
There needed to be a link from the website to the Great Plains Accounting package. However, no one had defined what was needed. Oh, and the Stock Exchange float was imminent, so there could be no slippage.The Solution
I spoke to Great Plains to find out what information their software required, and in what format it was needed.I spoke to Lastminute's Chief accountant to learn about, and document their accounting and purchasing systems.
I spoke to the developers of the website's shopping basket, to brief them on what information they needed to save for each purchase, and on what type of purchase there were (e.g. Lastminute bills the customer, the merchant bills the customer and LastMinute bill the merchant for a commission).
I created an application, written in Perl, to extract information from the LastMinute website database, and add currency information to it, e.g. value of turnover and commission (profit) in both local and UK Sterling.
The application was web based to allow for easy operation. There were 2 main function, update the accounting database table with new purchases, and export data for the Great Plains accounting application.
During development, the management reports team started accessing the accounting database, and so its functionality was expanded to support them.
The advantage of Perl was that it is high level, so is quick and easy to develop in, and fast and powerful at manipulating figures and text. More importantly, as its high level its very simple to understand and be maintained.
Finally, I documented the new purchasing and accounting systems, and the differing types of commission. The document was sent to LastMinute's entire senior management team.
Due to the efficiency of developing in Perl compared to Java, the accounting system was ready far in advance of the main application. So far in advance, that creating test data became a problem as the shopping basket wasn't ready!
Introduction