Case Studies

Alliance Data Systems regularly engages with large enterprise customers to provide vendor selection services for large-scale technology initiatives. Alliance has a finely tuned process for helping its customers select the most appropriate vendor and software based upon the business requirements. After manually implementing this process many times over, Alliance concluded that automating the process and centralizing the information would provide tremendous efficiencies and value to customers.

Alliance developed a prototype concept for a vendor selection solution called "AllSource". While the prototype satisfied the core functional requirements, it became clear that the company needed to partner with an expert software development company in order to bring the idea to full fruition. After investigating several Microsoft-focused software development firms, Alliance Data Systems selected Northridge as its partner to design and develop the production version of AllSource.

Northridge expanded on Alliance's design of the AllSource prototype and migrated from a classic "ASP" website framework to a more robust and scalable ASP.NET application. In addition, Northridge migrated the data store from a Microsoft Access database to a more robust SQL Server solution. Detailed and functional application screen designs were completed and application workflow was geared for a more technical user community.

The new version of AllSource has allowed Alliance to effortlessly add and manage new projects, including new questions and requirements to a tree-view structure, creating a full project tree of questions and requirements derived from a pre-existing template. In addition, Alliance personnel can easily set up internal users, client users, and vendor users with specific rights and privileges based upon the user's role in the engagement.