Our World | Working at the Speed of Light

We’re helping Italy’s National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) explore the fringes of science with some quick thinking and international collaboration.

Beneath the French-Swiss border lies an almost 27-kilometre-long machine – the Large Hadron Collider – that’s capable of firing particles at almost the speed of light. And as a leading light on nuclear and subnuclear physics, the INFN needs a one-stop solution to bring in the components they need to keep experiments going.

That’s when Paul McLoughlin, RS Purchasing ManagerTM Product Owner, and Andrea Cotton-Lees , Strategic Project Manager – Digital, helped add bespoke functionality to the tried-and-tested platform – at the request of the INFN – to secure a tender.

“INFN asked us to deliver some special customisations to our existing RS Purchasing Manager platform in three months,” explains Paul M. “For a platform that’s more than 20 years old – and has had no major updates in the last five years – changing things without regressing the platform and incurring issues was one of the team’s fundamental objectives.”

Paul’s talking about three additional new roles that the team added to the platform, each of which could be assigned to an INFN user: Executive Admin, User Admin and View Only. But what are the differences between the roles?

• Executive Admin gives the individual full permissions to dive into everything from spend controls, budget reporting and access to all Purchasing Manager accounts for their company
• User Admins can add and assign roles, plus edit or delete RS Purchasing Manager users
• The ‘View Only’ role allows a user to add items to their basket. They’re then able to share the basket by email with another user who has permissions to place an order.

No time to waste

“The developments would be invaluable to the INFN – and to future RS Purchasing Manager customers,” explains Andrea. “It was daunting that the platform hadn’t been developed in five years. But once we’d broken the work down, we were able to mitigate the risks ahead of us.”

To make the team’s goal a reality, they needed more resource. That meant onboarding a new team of engineers – who haven’t worked with the application or code before. Onboarding delays and laptop hold-ups at customs – which saw Paul and Tom Maslen fly to Poland to deliver the machines by hand – meant there was no time to lose. The engineers needed to hit the ground running.

Andrea adds: “They’ve been the stars of the project and truly exceeded expectations; surpassing the rapid pace we’d hoped they’d hit. Timelines were incredibly tight: we simply had no leeway, so any delays would make the deadline impossible to hit.

“So even when testing became an issue, the engineers, Release Management Team and cross functional teams pulled out all the stops to make sure we met our deadlines.”

Proving what’s possible

“We had a lot against us to get this over the line,” Paul explains. “Tight timeframes, a lot of unknowns and high-profile internal projects limiting our testing resource kept us laser focused.

“Thanks to the exceptional development and coding capability of our engineers, the team was able to execute flawless testing, enabling the team to successfully update the platform with new functionality.”

Better yet, the team wrapped up the three-month project a day before the deadline and within budget. So what’s their secret to success?

“Flexibility, patience and collaborative environment that enables each colleague to become a subject matter expert,” says Andrea. “Putting the customer first is non-negotiable, but we couldn’t have done so without the support of Claudio, Luca and the team – experts from the Italian market who managed the INFN closely – and our exceptional engineers.”

Paul adds: “This was truly a collaborative effort from the start. We’re seeing RS Purchasing Manager grow each year; and being able to support the business to bring in more revenue through this platform is something the team should be proud of.

Cross-border collaboration

“We’ve never seen a project completed like this – not in my six years in role. The team working through the requests at speed had a burden on them: but they were quick, clear and excellent communicators. That meant, when mistakes happened, everyone kept their cool and worked together to find a solution; and that was driven by a true sense of cooperation between us, the developers and the UK team.” Luca Pezzetti , eProcurement Specialist

“Testing can be truly tedious and tense. But by managing expectations of what was possible, we could clearly communicate what was needed to the team: which made things more straightforward for the engineers, too. The performance of the team was no surprise – they’re excellent and never let their nerves show – but being able to improve an old system was.” Claudio Arnone , eProcurement Consultant