Many businesses struggle to find professional IT staffing that fits a specific niche. Our client, an industry leader in providing integrated payment solutions, marketing services, security services, and retail products, was no different.

The company faced challenges in finding professional San Antonio IT contractors skilled in Oracle ATG, a niche skill set. Many of the professionals they came across didn’t have the level of technical expertise they were seeking and had little-to-no tangible work experience. When the company was able to find professionals that made the cut, it was difficult to retain them for the duration of a project.

As a result, our client experienced a high contractor turnover rate. Company resources were strained in an endless human resource process: searching for ATG professionals, interviewing, and then hiring. Inevitably, the process would then start all over again when the contractors did not fit the level of expertise needed or were not able to be retained.

Our client found it difficult to meet project deliverables and, as a result, struggled to meet project timelines. This caused them to miss revenue targets for new online products and services.

Action:

That’s when the client turned to Y&L Consulting. We came in and began with an assessment of the current and proposed future ATG projects the company was considering. From there, we began discussions on the type and level of skill sets needed. Because our client had numerous applications that had migrated from a .Net platform over to ATG, they had a significant need for proven ATG resources who had worked on online retail applications before.

In addition to various stand-alone retail applications, their main check and accessory-ordering application needed a migration from ATG version 9.1 to 10.0.1.

Based upon the level of customization involved in previous versions, the ATG migration took approximately seven months to complete. Legacy databases needed integration, and feature customizations needed to be reinstated into the new version of the software. This required the skill and attention of very savvy ATG programmers and QA resources provided by Y&L.

Impact:

Y&L Consulting had a number of experienced ATG programmers already on staff as members of their ATG practice. For additional needs, they were able to leverage their extensive consultant database and farm the open market to fill our client’s needs from both a programming and QA perspective.

With Y&L Consulting’s ATG product expertise, our client was able to break the ineffective and endless hiring cycle and instead focus on completing projects.

The client relied on Y&L Consulting’s acute knowledge of the ATG software and, more specifically, the multisite features which allowed flexibility within different environments and commerce applications. It was Y&L Consulting’s responsibility to identify and select which ATG multisite features to adapt to enable specific business requirements. The overall upgrade and retail application-specific features were developed and deployed to the overall satisfaction of our client. The company continues to use Y&L for all of their ATG development, QA, and maintenance needs.