DWS has an excellent reputation which is built on the strength of its people and their superior knowledge of the JDEdwards EnterpriseOne and Oracle E-Business Suite of products.

Awards
Outstanding achievement in consultant certification
JD Edwards Consulting Partner of the Year for two years in a row

Methodology
DWS places great emphasis on the initial design stage, as it determines the ultimate level of success for the implementation and reduces costly redesign and redeployment. It is critical that both DWS and its customers fully understand the scope of the work prior to the commencement of programming. Our consultants have the experience to advise on the functional solution and ensure that the technical design is efficient and not unnecessarily complex.
Our proven development methodology provides the strong basis to support the in-house quality process at DWS. A combination of our STAR (Software Tracking and Resourcing) System and software development life cycle processes enables our project managers and development teams to strictly adhere to this methodology in order to provide a solution which meets customers' business requirements within estimated time-scales.

STAR - Key Features
Project management reporting
Issues database
Task history
Task documentation management
Object tracking
STAR cross reference utility
ESU impact analysis reporting
Time entry, giving full accountability to the customer
Object transfer tracking
Internet Availability (WebSTAR)
Customers use WebSTAR to track their own projects and tasks on our systems via a web browser to give them realtime information on specific tasks. This has proved a significant advantage to project managers with tight deadlines to manage.

Infrastructure

Off-site overview
From the outset, DWS had the primary goal of creating an infrastructure that would support a remote development model to support our customers. There were a number of key drivers for this:-

1. We could control the quality of the work being done for our customers by having all our consultants in one physical place working to one proven methodology.

2. We have proven that quality of work is vastly improved by having the team in one location sharing knowledge between each other. This sharing of knowledge helps us to come up with the most imaginative solutions for the customer.

3. By having an off-site development team, customers do not have to invest in large amounts of office space, hardware and demands on their own internal IT function.

4. We understand that continuity is a big issue for many of our clients. As a result of our excellent working environment, staff retention levels are excellent. Many of our clients have been with us for years and have built up excellent relationships with key members of our team.

5. We can lower the cost of ownership as the customer only pays when we are working on a specific approved task.

6. Clients are able to continue running their business uninterrupted and unencumbered by an upgrade of their modifications to a new release while the programming work is in progress. This way it may be possible to start the upgrade process sooner, rather than wait for the acquisition of new hardware and the setup of the new release and infrastructure.

Off-site set up
We create a custom environment on our servers for each customer, ensuring that the modifications are kept separate from those of other clients. Our server farm supports multiple releases of EnterpriseOne and E-Business Suite.
Where necessary, we can also perform a take-on of the customer's modifications where they have engaged DWS as their long term, off-site development partner. In this situation, we would take a copy of all their modifications from their system and load into the custom created environment at DWS. We can also take data with the customer's approval, from the customer site to help with more realistic testing at DWS.
To support this multi-release, multi-customer remote model, we now have 14 servers supporting Oracle, DB2, and SQL databases.