Polarion ALM supports and enables successful development of software solutions for international trade

Comprehensive ERP software for international trade

As a market leader in the international trade industry, Amital Data Ltd. (Amital) strives to deliver highly sophisticated solutions that are based on state-of-the-art technologies. The company focuses on understanding market dynamics to make sure that its products respond to changing requirements and operational, financial and logistical challenges. Amital understands the importance of bridging the information gap between trading partners across the global supply chain, improving the flow of information between all parties, responding to customers’ particular needs and delivering quality services at all times.

Amital Data develops the Unifreight family of software products with the vision of providing comprehensive enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions for international trade. These solutions are used by all types of companies that conduct global trade, including freight forwarders, shipping agents, airline cargo sales agents and customs brokers, enabling them to maximize operational efficiency and productivity while improving competitiveness in the global market. Serving the industry since 1988, Amital employs a staff of dedicated professionals with hundreds of man-years of experience in international trade and software development.

Better solutions for software development

In the past, Amital Data used an in-house software development solution that had been developed to replace Microsoft Excel, which was used to manage development task lists. The company had no formal source control program to track and control changes, revisions and software versions.

These limitations led the company to search for more capable solutions to support its software development process. Amital Data was seeking a solution that could document what was done with each task. After a market analysis and examination of various possibilities, the company selected Polarion ALM™ software from product lifecycle management (PLM) provider Siemens Digital Industries Software.

“We wanted a tool that could store and easily show what was done in each task,” says Eitan Hartman, development manager at Amital Data. “We wanted a tool that could alert about exceptions before they actually happen, and make the design-develop-test-develop cycle easier. We also needed the ability to customize it and interface with our project management tools. We looked at other options, such as HP PLM, Jira and others. The ability to integrate with our tools and the pre-alerts were very important to our decision to go with Polarion. Polarion ALM makes the design and development process easier.”

Managing multiple projects in a dynamic market

Amital operates in a dynamic market, with multiple demands from its clients. The company uses Polarion planning and resource management tools and real-time reporting to manage multiple projects and optimize prioritization and release predictability. “With Polarion we can manage parallel development projects, predict the projects’ actual end time, and, if needed, adjust priorities in order to complete projects on time,” Hartman says.

One of the key tools for Amital is Polarion’s Query Builder, which the company uses to create queries that efficiently search for and retrieve task information. “We use the Query Builder to seek and find old tasks, to get an accurate view of ongoing tasks, and to group tasks according to whatever criteria we need,” notes Hartman. “The ability to filter by custom fields that we’ve configured is also frequently used. Actually, we’ve built and stored queries that guide each employee on their roles, tasks and responsibilities.”

Amital also uses the Polarion application programming interface (API) to tailor the solution to specific company requirements. “With the Polarion API we were able address the needs of our management and development teams and give our project managers full control,” Hartman notes. “We have used some simple cascading style sheets and Javascript code to support right-to-left language and to automatically update actual time effort in our billing system. We’ve connected our development environment to Subversion source control and to Polarion tasks, so we now can easily identify the exact code that has been changed due to each task.” These capabilities have enabled the company to establish procedural steps for each type of development, such as new code development and bug fixes that were reported by clients.

“With the help of Polarion ALM we’ve established a formal development cycle,” says Hartman.

The project managers are now able to recognize the individual steps of the programmers and, above all, to foresee what they will do next. By using Polarion ALM, our project managers can identify future problems and have the flexibility to change them.”