Victor Girardin

About the project

The aim of the thesis project was partially to map the process of procurement (and associated processes) within the Scalae department of Altran. After, a system was designed with the purpose to ease the work routines within the selected processes.

In this project spotlight, we will first take a brief look at the underlying theoretical framework of the thesis. Under system review, the interested reader can take a look at screenshots taken from within the system, try out the process of adding purchase posts to an example project and take a look on the E/R-diagram of the system which visualizes the database structure. Following the system review, a summary of the technical specifications of the system and platform is presented.

If you are interested in contacting me, scroll down to the bottom of the site where you will find my contact information.

Victor Girardin,
Lund, August 2016

Theoretical framework

Procurement in projects

Studying Burt D. & Soukup W. (1985), companies in the New Product Development (NPD) business need to approach procurement situations according to the following guidelines:

Project managers must master the entire product development process - especially purchases.
The technical competences of suppliers must make the most of the suppliers' technical competences.
Engineers working with product development must also be directly involved in project purchases.

Project management and control

Gardiner P. discusses in Project Management - A Strategic Management Approach (2005) different ways to control and manage projects, mentioning different ways of setting up a project control system:

Control limits is suggested for projects with tight time- or budget frames.
Milestone monitoring is suggested as a simple control system for projects without detailed plans.
The Earned Value Analysis (EVA) -method possibly suitable for more complex projects

System requirements and demands

Lauesen S. defines three types of requirements in Software Requirements - Styles and Techniques (2002) that are necessary for a System Requirement Specification (SRS). These requirement types are data requirements, functional requirements and quality requirements. For the project, we focus on Data reuirements which are typically divided into:

Data storage
Input/output formats
Communication States

Modular system design

The design of the system follows the principles outlined in Managing in an Age of Modularity by Baldwin C. and Clark and is especially suitable for organizing complicated process in an effective manner. A modular system design consists of multiple independent modules. Two of the mentioned rules are particularly relevant for the project:

An architecture that specifies which modules that are to be included in the system and what functions the modules have.
An interface which in detail describes how the modules are connected to each other and how they communicate internally.

System review

System screenshots

To illustrate how the system looks from a user perspective, a couple of screenshots are available for public view. Click here to check out the system screenshots

Try out the project purchase module

COMING SOON: For those who are interested in getting their hands dirty, a feature has been implemented that resembles the systems "Project purchase view".

NOTE: This is requires a username and a password (ask, and you shall receive).

System architecture (E/R-diagram)

COMING SOON: The "blue print" of the system database has been illustrated in an E/R-diagram which and will give you an idea of the size and complexity of the project. It will soon be uploaded here.

Document generation

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Compatible with any device

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Quick implementation

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Technical specifications

Front-end

In order to save time, improve usability and give the system a nice look, a license to a user suitable interface was purchased. The interface consisted of customized designs of Bootstrap-elements as well as many other third party tools and libraries. Techniques used while developing the system front-end included Twig, CSS, Sass, Jquery and Ajax. The aim of working with these techniques was to produce a user friendly environment.

Back-end

The system back-end was build in PHP 5.6.X. During development, a new version of PHP was about to be released. Therefore it made sense to write code that would run without issues in PHP 7 which the system in its current form fully support. The database management system of choice was Mysql although the entire database architecture was build in an object oriented manner using the ORM Doctrine.

Frameworks & utilities

The platform of the system had to support many demands including high availability, high security, high usability and high traceability. The choice fell upon the PHP-Framework Symfony (at the time, version 2.7.X). The framework was particularly useful due to some of its Bundles, including the FOS User Bundle (for a manageable user configuration), the Doctrine ORM (for database architecture and communication).

Platform

The selected web server was Nginx - a highly configurable and popular alternative to Apache. The system was developed on different servers (including a Raspberry Pi Rev 2B running Raspbian). The system was finally deployed on a DigitalOcean-droplet running the operative system Debian (currently Debian Stretch) - well known for it's high reliability and stability.

Master Thesis Spotlight

Welcome to this exhibit of my master thesis:

Projects and Purchases