Contoso GbR is a bicycle manufacturer that produces high-quality road bikes and mountain terrain bikes (MTB) and sells them directly or through selected bicycle dealers. The managing director of this fictitious company is the equally fictitious person Manfred Obermeier. His son Dirk Obermeier is responsible for product sales. The back office is managed by Monika Obermeier, sales is supported by Ulrich Frey and Andrea Obermeier takes care of purchasing. The warehouse reports to Dieter Krause and the bicycles are produced by Marcel Hofmann, master craftsman and head of production, Marco Drechsler, journeyman, and apprentice Leonie Ziegler. I, Michael Schäfer, am of course responsible for information technology and everything related to it. All these people will accompany us in this project in which I try to bring you closer to JTL-Wawi 1.0 and all other products of JTL-Software.

Why a model company?

“If you know yourself and the enemy, you need not fear the outcome of a hundred battles.” – The Art of War

Probably the vast majority of go to the introduction of JTL-Wawi and the other products of JTL according to the following pattern. Download the software, install it, configure it and get started. This is my experience that I have made with many customers. Of course, there are exceptions that form project teams for the introduction and approach the matter in a highly professional manner together with external service providers. Very few of JTL’s service partners are likely to be in a position to carry out such projects in an appropriate form due to their size and structure. Not because you can’t, but because you simply don’t have the necessary resources yourself and hardly any customers are willing to pay for it.

However, complaining does not help here. Next year version 1.0 will be released and I have set myself the task for 2015 to give you everything you need for a successful implementation of your projects and daily operations based on my sample company Contoso GbR. I divided the whole thing into two phases:

Phase 1: Implementation of JTL products at Contoso GbR

Phase 2: Operation of JTL solutions

So I have a lot of work ahead of me over the next few weeks and months, and you can join me here.

What Contoso GbR does and its employees I have already written in the introduction to this article. In order to get a better overview I have drawn two graphics which show the organization of Contoso GbR and the computer network.

Organization chart Contoso GbR

Contoso organization chart

Network Contoso GbR

Contoso network

I created the two graphs with yEd Graph Editor, a freeware alternative to Microsoft Visio that can also be used to create such graphs. For project management I use ProjectLibre as an alternative to Microsoft Project.

What’s next?

For the implementation of JTL-Wawi, JTL-Shop, JTL-WMS and eazyAuction we need a project plan including all project documents. The way I see this project at the beginning, it will be best to split this into 3 to 4 individual projects. Thus, I can achieve not to lose the overview in the individual subprojects. In parallel, I have already started to prepare my hardware for this project, as specified in the network plan. From my point of view, the definition of business processes is very important.

Afterwards we start with the subproject of the implementation of JTL-Wawi.

Here you can find the documentation for the installation of JTL-Wawi in a multi-user environment.

• Installation SQL Server Express
• Setting up the database for the multi-user environment
• Installation JTL-Wawi Client

In parallel, I recommend preparing a client with SQL server to serve as a test system. Alternatively, you can also create an additional client.

That should be it for the time being of the entrance into my “small” project Contoso GbR.