Situation
At Allianz Austria, the inability to properly measure the quality and quantity of code produced meant that bug correction activities jumped from 15 to 30 percent. Indeed the organization had no effective way to implement quality enforcement and to provide useful feedback to developers on how to enhance the quality of their output. Application quality and structure analysis were still a manual process and, as such, it was prone to error, labor-intensive and often simply neglected for lack of time.

Solution
Allianz Austria solved this problem by implementing a major quality management initiative and by using the CAST Application Intelligence Platform for its automatic application structure inspection process. This allowed IT executives to successfully appraise projects, measure and reward the quality, quantity, and efficiency of work produced.

Results
It boosted the IT value to the business with a 230 percent increase in application functionality, while reducing cost at 20 percent annually over three years. More importantly, substantial time savings in bug detection increased business speed and higher quality product achieved significantly higher user satisfaction. Business success, combined with an objective reward-based system, improved developer motivation.

Situation
In today’s competitive financial services environment, poor software quality is just not acceptable. The goal at Raymond James IT was to provide improved service to their network of financial advisors by enhancing time-to-market and improving AD productivity. From a functionality standpoint, they need to support a wide variety of financial products, independence for the financial advisors being one of the pillars of their business model.

Solution
Through an initial pilot project, focused on a core Customer Account Profile application, they realized with CAST software how bad their off-the-shelf code was as a starting point for the application. Extended to their most likely-to-evolve systems, CAST gave Raymond James the ability to add measurement to their existing SDLC process, to drive fact-based decision making. Their software engineering manager could look at the code to make enhancements to it and improve its transferability and maintainability.

Results
With the help of CAST software, Raymond James found a systematic way to govern quality in their AD process, while accelerating delivery to the business, reducing breaks in the code and learning better ways to achieve reuse. IT can do a better job at communicating with their business users, while developer productivity and mobility increased significantly.

Situation
The DTCC was faced with a common challenge – the need to develop complex, critical software systems in a tight timeframe with limited internal resources, so they decided to multi-source the project. But the benefits of outsourcing can be offset by lack of control over the offshore resources, and increased risk of poor quality being introduced into the software.

Solution
The DTCC has been able to offset the considerable risk of outsourcing by improving their control over far-flung development projects, through better visibility over the quality and quantity of the code produced. Indeed the CAST software platform helps them monitor not only software quality but also the performance of their application development teams. This is guaranteed by analyzing every single line of code of an application’s inner structure currently being developed offshore.

Results
The DTCC has been using the CAST software platform to automatically measure the outcome of two strategic outsourced development projects and has seen significant improvements in the quality and performance of their off-shore partner. DTCC management was able to mitigate risk by reducing the number of defects, increase their control over their offshore partner, and significantly raise the level of comfort in DTCC’s boardroom to globalize more business.

Situation
The FDA’s application development (AD) efforts comprise eight decentralized development centers that are staffed with in-house developers, with a large number of contractors. FDA was looking to improve the success and efficiency of maintenance and development projects, while meeting OMB-300 business case requirements. Prior attempts at manual code inspection proved time-consuming and error-prone, and the FDA decided for a change in its IT business process.

Solution
FDA decided to create a "software development factory," based on the use of the CAST platform. The goal of the factory is to instill better quality and standards enforcement, delivering immediate development productivity gains and long lasting improvements to application maintenance and security. A fundamental first step to build the "software factory" was a global set of objective parameters and metrics put in place to monitor AD work across all FDA teams, including suppliers. The FDA is the first federal agency to automate application inner structure review and analysis at the enterprise level.

Results
By increasing quality levels in the early cycles of AD, the FDA is eliminating significant defects that would invariably turn into expensive patches. By being more systematic, the FDA is working to improve agility, while increasing resource utilization and product quality.

Situation
The BIAC is working on one of the world’s largest SAP implementations in insurance industry, for Vienna Insurance Group. The goal is to change overall processes to SAP, replacing the existing island solutions and individually developed systems in order to save costs. This change was to include the implementation of a standardized insurance management system for contract administration, commissioning and services as well as invoicing. However, one of the biggest challenges is managing a large and diverse SAP implementation team. Multiple teams situated in different locations and with varying levels of experience and expertise are working on the project. To top it off, they are implementing the latest SAP release.

Solution
BIAC management team chose CAST Application Intelligence Platform (AIP) to manage the risks of implementation, to deliver a superior solution to the business and to reduce the long term costs of the SAP solution.

Results
BIAC has used CAST AIP solution not only to manage their implementation risks but also to deliver superior products to the business. The following are some specific benefits that BIAC is able to achieve with CAST AIP.

• Mitigate risks
  • Identified defects and issues early in the cycle, helping improve timely production roll-out
  • Improved production stability by identifying technical defects that are hard to catch with functional testing only, right in the development stage
• Reduce costs
  • Eliminated expensive and time consuming manual code reviews that required the time of the most valuable resources
  • Reduced long term maintenance costs by ensuring a higher quality code that is easy to understand and change
• Improve Productivity:
  • Automated documentation from source code ensures easier knowledge transfer between teams
  • Improved developer productivity by ensuring all the teams are using defined standards

Situation
Although Maritz’s core business is services centric, IT is at the heart of every service offering. Maritz provides Managed Services to 30 of the Global 50 largest enterprises. Over the past 10-15 years most of the services offered by the company have been repackaged to be delivered via internet. Maritz has been constantly innovating and being on the cutting edge in using technology to deliver high quality service to its customers.
However as new business units were added to explore new markets, each built their own IT organization, operating independently. As a result multiple development platforms and standards emerged making it difficult to streamline operations across the company and to take advantage of scale and size. Moreover, with competition increasing, speed of delivery and quality of applications has become critically important, as it has a direct impact on customer experience and the bottom-line of business. Customers routinely incorporate contractual SLA’s with financial penalties for missed targets. Also, serving 30 of the Global 50 companies, Maritz faces stringent requirements for increased security, privacy, etc., to protect customer data.

Solution
True to Maritz tradition of innovation, the Corporate IT organization started evaluating solutions that will help them to stay cutting edge by:

• Managing risks upfront in the development cycle and improve customer experience by delivering solutions that are high quality and on time.
• Standardizing application development across different business units to ensure cheaper, faster and better applications.
• Automating the validation of applications to ensure Payment Card Industry (PCI)* security compliance.
• Proactively managing quality of deliverables from vendors, and build a healthy relationship with them through fact-based communication.
• Providing executive level insights and visibility to help make portfolio level decisions and arm managers with the right information to have more productive discussions with both the internal and the vendor teams

Results
Using CAST had 4 key benefits:

• Improving Time-to-Market: CAST immediately made a difference by helping Maritz business to deliver high quality products to customers on-time. (Please see the Maritz Customer Success Story for details.)
• Standardizing Application Development: All the IT development across different business units was standardized, with CAST being at the core of the effort. CAST was integrated into software development cycle to ensure continuous improvement of quality and to provide standards governance.
• PCI Compliance: CAST helped Maritz to build secure coding practices upfront in the development cycle and also automate PCI compliance verification. In 2008, InformationWeek recognized Maritz’ efforts to ensure data security for their clients as Maritz Loyalty Marketing was designated as a tier-one service provider under the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard
• Vendor Management: CAST has provided objective and fact-based visibility into vendor deliverables, helping Maritz control risks while reducing costs.

Situation
The WySTAR business unit had grown through multiple M&A situations over the last few years, the core of the business having been acquired by several organizations. Their technology stack has grown very complex with multiple technologies added over the last 15 years. This is further complicated by the fast changing business, systems from multiple mergers and acquisitions, and ever increasing regulatory and compliance requirements. To top it all off, there is significant pressure to cut costs down and deliver more to keep business competitive.

Solution
In order to support the strategic objectives of using technology to differentiate from competition while controlling costs, the client’s IT organization has invested in CAST Application Intelligence Platform (AIP) to:

• Be a world class organization delivering high quality applications repeatedly on-time and on-budget
• Maximize the business impact of internal resources and technology productivity of outsourced labor
• Work with best-of-breed systems integrators to leverage external expertise and empower them to be successful by delivering higher quality products
• Gain visibility into existing assets and consolidate core technologies to reduce maintenance costs
• Mitigate risks and reduce costs by building quality into customer-facing products

Results
Since the implementation of CAST AIP, Wells Fargo’s IT organization has achieved world class business results:

• Started and implemented 250 projects in 2008 - 2009
• Integrated two acquisitions during same time
• Up-time of 99.99% - above and beyond agreed in SLAs
• Many SLAs are 100%, hitting stretch goal
• Cost/defect per 100 resource hours reduced by a factor of 10