April 2006 Volume 10, Number 2

TurnOver's Design Matches Polo's Style

By Mary Langen, Marketing Project Leader; and Joe Baumgarten, Senior Sales Engineer

Ralph Lauren’s Polo brand has defined quality, taste, and style for products ranging from clothing to house paint for nearly 40 years. Picture this: at the same time Ralph Lauren was establishing the Polo label with a successful line of ties, Dr. Frank Soltis was selling the radical concepts of the System/38 architecture to IBM’s developers.

The award-winning designer himself is a patron of the arts, philanthropist, and business innovator. Starting with only $50,000 borrowed from a friend, Lauren has become the biggest selling fashion designer in the world, growing his company to 300 stores with a multitude of brands grossing over $10 billion a year. He has outfitted everyone from Robert Redford in “The Great Gatsby” to Gwyneth Paltrow and Sheryl Crow at the Oscars. In recent years, Ralph Lauren created the Polo.com Website and made it a dynamic multimedia experience. The company also extended its portfolio by acquiring Club Monaco, a contemporary lifestyle brand with an edgy, urban line of apparel, home furnishings, and accessories.

It is not surprising that such an enduring and progressive company has demanding IT requirements. Dominick Maniaci, manager of retail systems for the Polo Ralph Lauren development team in Lyndhurst, NJ, summed up the situation by saying: “We were faced with an implementation with multiple complex environments, and we needed a flexible solution for promoting objects and files that were to be distributed to an array of different libraries." At the same time, Polo had to comply with stringent Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) requirements. They required a software change management (SCM) system that could provide rigorous workflow management and support critical new projects.

The Lyndhurst team had attempted to implement their change management configuration using another vendor’s product and found it lacking. What Polo needed was a change management tool to conform to its current needs and existing structures. The experience with the first change management vendor had that priority backwards. By the time the Polo's team came to SoftLanding, they had a long list of requirements and a lot of skepticism.

A Good Design

Dominick works with a team of 16 developers and consultants, four of whom are offshore. Together, they are responsible for maintaining Island Pacific merchandising applications running in multiple environments on an iSeries 870. This team must respond to constant requests for changes and enhancements to Polo’s Island Pacific applications.

The Island Pacific merchandising applications run on three LPARs: one serves U.S. outlets and retail stores, the second covers the company’s London (and European) stores, and the last serves the new Club Monaco stores. Polo is currently managing different versions of Island Pacific’s code for all environments.

In an effort to simplify this cornucopia of change, Polo initiated a long-running project to consolidate the disparate versions of Island Pacific code into a single version. This development is happening in parallel with the day-to-day changes to the original code. It was important that Polo staff members focus more on their jobs and less on correctly managing the changes, and that meant the SCM needed to handle the details in this complex environment. SoftLanding's TurnOver was able to address each situation, said Dominick.

“TurnOver doesn’t require a central repository of all the objects you are trying to manage. You just drop it over the top of what’s there, and TurnOver handles the inconsistencies,” Dominick noted.

Existing for years in a fast paced, dynamic retail environment with no formal SCM tool had left many inconsistencies in the location of source and their matching objects. Rather than force Polo to resolve each and every inconsistency before activating SCM, TurnOver gave them options. In some cases, Polo chose to redirect TurnOver to where the “rogue” items currently lived. In other cases, Polo chose to delay the standardization of non-critical objects.

Polo set up individual change management "application definitions" to support its many versions and customizations of Island Pacific applications. Individual definitions enabled Polo to configure the change management system to the unique needs of each custom application. This ensures that modifications are managed correctly each and every time, with very little human intervention required.

One of SoftLanding’s Sales Engineers, Joe Baumgarten, worked closely with Dominick to get Polo correctly configured. “Polo’s set up is complex,” he remembers, “but it is not complicated. In every case, we were able to find a way for TurnOver to meet a unique requirement.”

Joe learned early on that Polo’s environment required almost all of the flexibility that TurnOver could bring. He addressed Polo’s complex workflow through TurnOver’s type codes and exit points. “The fact that they were maintaining several applications from Island Pacific’s software, as well as their own customizations, specific compilation requirements, and multiple final destinations had been a terrible burden on their staff up to this point. By teaching TurnOver all of these complexities, we let the package own them. This is exactly what Polo had desired all along.”

Complying with Audits
Sarbanes-Oxley compliance requirements added yet another layer of complexity. When Dominick came to Ralph Lauren in 2003, SOX compliance was a driver for Polo to get change management in place. SOX requires separation of duties, a recurring theme when it comes to compliance. With TurnOver, Polo found it easy to manage this by specifying who can run promotions at what levels and who needs to approve promotions before they can run.

Joe also configured TurnOver’s powerful distribution capabilities to manage Polo’s dispersed testing environment requirements. While all development activity is centralized on one partition, Polo requires each application’s QA and production environments to reside on different partitions. This eases the testing burden on Polo’s business analysts and helps accomplish SOX’s “separation of duties” requirement. To accomplish this, TurnOver distributes to different partitions at different points in the workflow.

Another excellent feature is the auditing notification. When something is changed outside of the application, an alert message is sent to the administrator. “Absolutely one of the best things about TurnOver is that it’s helpful for audits. TurnOver has all the reporting functions we need to comply with SOX,” says Dominick. Again, this was something Polo found lacking in other change management packages.

Customer Satisfaction

Dominick has some good words regarding SoftLanding’s on-going support. “Whenever we had an obstacle to overcome, SoftLanding helped us resolve issues. They were very patient and were there to help when we had to make changes and needed assistance,” he says.

Perhaps the best mark of TurnOver’s success at Polo is how pleased the developers are with TurnOver’s ease of use. “The developers are very comfortable with TurnOver,” says Dominick. “We especially like the concept of promotion through a form and how easy it is to use. When I want to visualize something, I can get a good idea of what development is doing via the form or the Programmer’s Worklist.” Since TurnOver owns the complexity and fully understands the promotion workflow required for each unique change, developers can now focus more time on development and less time managing change.

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