About Market6
Market6 designs and integrates innovative technologies and services for retailers and their suppliers to improve marketing, operations, and supply chain efficiencies. Market6 is the retail industry leader in “last mile” supply chain technology innovation. The company’s founders have been providing technology solutions in the U.S. supermarket industry for over 25 years. The Market6 consumer demand-driven inventory management system increases sales and profitability for retailers by controlling out-of-stocks, spoilage and wasted inventory. Designed to integrate with retailers’ and manufacturers’ existing infrastructure, the Market6 solution optimizes more timely and accurate data for product availability and consumer demand. By providing the most accurate forecast updated daily on a store level basis, self-correcting perpetual inventory, and new ways to process enormous amounts of point of sale (POS) data, Market6 helps retailers and their suppliers create the order to maximize shelf profitability.


Business Challenges
In their ongoing efforts towards a lightweight Software Life-cycle Management (SLM) solution, Market6 sought tighter integration of the tools and processes in their environment. They also wanted a platform that would facilitate ease of use and cross-departmental participation and collaboration between Field Operations, Product Management, Engineering, and Support.

Specifically, Market6 wanted their Field Operations and other remote teams to be able to easily and efficiently submit and track tasks, bugs and other issues relevant to their projects without having to deal with the learning curve associated with the specific tools.

Similarly, in implementing an integrated, lightweight and efficient Software Life-cycle Management solution, Market6 wanted their Business Analysts to be able to easily capture requirements and use cases and submit them to engineering for review and execution with relative ease and thru automation while maintaining contextual reference between the requested features and the corresponding development and testing activities, in other words, requirements management and tracking across the life-cycle.

 

Solution
Market6 turned to zAgile for its innovative and unique products that would not only address the integration challenges of their current environment but also provide a strategic platform that would enable integration of future tools and processes. 

The zAgile portal acts as a single point of access to all the applications, a container for exposing the appropriate features and functions of the various tools and a dashboard that provides the integrated view. Underneath, zAgile provides an infrastructure consisting of a rich set of software engineering ontologies which combine semantically relevant information from heterogeneous applications and tools used in the software life cycle. The network of ontologies contextually integrates Processes, Projects, People and Products to provide a cohesive, measurable, and predictable environment.

Niall Murphy, VP of Engineering at Market6, commented, “zAgile seemed too good to be true, but they proved it to me. Before zAgile, we had the right tools, but we saw opportunities to gain more efficiency. There were manual synchronizations which if eliminated would allow us to spend more time focusing on improving our products. In addition, we saw opportunities to use the tools more efficiently in two ways. First, we wanted to allow our engineering team to improve the software development process. And second, we wanted to provide our business users a more integrated experience that does not force them to learn to use the more complex underlying software management tools. Having achieved both, now we are even more productive across engineering, professional services, and product management teams.”

 

About zAgile
zAgile is the leader and pioneer of Software Information Management (SIM), the sector dedicated to integrating and managing information associated with all phases and aspects of the software engineering life cycle. zAgile has solved one of the most long-standing and perplexing problems in the software engineering industry: the problem of integrating teams, tools, processes and knowledge in software engineering environments.


Customer:  Market6

Business Challenges:

  • Improve team collaboration, coordination, and process flows in software and project delivery cycles
  • Reduce time spent by the Professional Services team in creating and managing customer project issues and tasks as well as collaborating with Engineering.

 

Environment:

  • Atlassian Jira: issue and task management and tracking
  • Atlassian Confluence wiki for sharing feature requirement documents and collaboration
  • ThoughtWorks CruiseControl for continuous integration and release
  • Pyxis Technologies GreenHopper for project planning

 

Requirements:

  • Business Analysts required easy way to create feature requirements and automatically cascade those to all software delivery tools and teams
  • Engineering required easy software delivery information discovery and consistency
  • The Professional Services team needed an easy way to submit and manage tasks  and issues.

 

Solution
Market6 could easily “plug” their existing software engineering environment into the zAgile semantic repository and application, enabling:

  • Semantic capture of feature and requirements in Confluence wiki, directly submit those requirements to engineering through task creation and linking in Jira and  contextually integrating with the whole software engineering system
  • Professional Services use a zAgile portal as an easy front-end to Jira, for issue and task creation and management.

 

Benefits
Market6 now has one cohesive, automatically synchronized software engineering and collaboration system rather than silos of tools and inconsistent information and processes. This saves Market6 substantial time and efforts across teams and ensures consistent quality of information.

 



“zAgile seemed too good to be true, but they proved it to me. Before zAgile, we had the right tools, but we saw opportunities to gain more efficiency. … now we are even more productive across engineering, professional services, and product management teams.”

Niall Murphy
 VP of Engineering, Market6