“We had to face the music. The result is an application that works correctly”
Replacing the booking system
Riksja Travel is a provider of customized journeys to faraway places. Customers can use building blocks to build their ideal journey and request a quote. Riksja employees make the necessary reservations based on these quotes and handle all payments. Until recently Riksja Travel used an in-house developed booking system for this. When this system was up for replacement, a solution from an existing vendor was sought. The CRM functionality was implemented first with the intention of implementing the entire suite eventually.
Robbert Homburg, ICT Manager at Riksja: “For us the booking system is the hart of the organization. It needs to work flawlessly, even when all hands are on deck and using the system. Because we couldn't figure out what the problem was and neither could the supplier, I asked an acquaintance at Sciante to look at the problem”.
Unexplained disruptions
At first the system seemed to work as expected, but after a while it started to falter. It started with small, unexplained disruptions but at a certain moment larger problems popped up. It happened especially when more that ten people were using the system at the same time. At an organization with 150 people in The Netherlands, 150 in Germany and 30 in the UK that's far from ideal.
Finger on the sore spot
After an extensive scan that measured more that just the application itself, Sciante quickly put their finger on the sore spot. The application was using a default configuration instead of the configured configuration. This resulted in only two CPU's being allocated to the application, causing the limit of ten users at the same time.
Recommendations to improve performance
Additionally the application traffic was not prioritized higher than bulk traffic, like large downloads or updates, on the internet connection. This caused the application traffic to be displaced occasionally which led to application delays at unpredictable moments. Sciante also made recommendations that would improve the performance of the software itself. An example of this is a more efficient use of the database. The software vendor also picked up Sciante's findings energetically to improve their services.
Homburg: “Sciante is an independant party so they don't need to spare anybody. Both the software vendor and we at Riksja were told where we dealt with things incorrectly. But that's what you hire them for, you want to know where the problems are as quickly as possible. Sciante gave us specific tips and advice that we could get to work with ourselves. The result is an application that works correctly”.
About Riksja
Riksja specializes in dream trips to faraway places that are fully customizable. Riksja employees have visited all locations personally and know exactly what experience their customers will get. Sciante helped Riksja maintain that high level of service and quality.