With restrictions and prohibitions on cigarette advertising in the media, the importance of brands has increased considerably. Souza Cruz, through its points of sale, uses merchandising pieces to promote its products.
The rental of a space for advertising at a point of sale is established through a contract between the company and the retailer, covering, among other items, the contract validity period, the amount to be paid, and/or product bonuses for the retailers.
In this context, space rental contracts were typed manually, directly in Microsoft WORD. The manual and error-prone process caused budgetary and legal impacts. To solve this problem, the LEI System was designed.
What is the LEI system?
The LEI System presents itself as an integrated solution for controlling space rental contracts for merchandising pieces, including budget control, accounting, and management information (reports and queries), in addition to solving the operational problems of the current process and the new business demands of Souza Cruz, as it serves all the company’s regional offices, involving the Back Office, Financial, and Sales sectors.
Among the main benefits are agility in drafting contracts, execution of informational checks (validating data on the Brazilian Federal Revenue and Serasa websites), automated system approval, greater control of contract information, and automated payment, integrating the company’s internal systems.
Humberto Moises, manager at Souza Cruz, comments that “The Lei System, designed by Teclógica, was created to meet a very important demand for Souza Cruz, which is the control of Space Rental contracts, allowing information management to be carried out more effectively”.
He also comments that “Teclógica greatly assisted us in assembling these technical solutions, having acted both in project management and in contributing technical knowledge in a very positive way, ensuring success in the project execution”.
Teclógica’s Vision
Paulo Antunes, Project Manager at Teclógica, comments on his participation in this project. Watch the video or read the report below:
1. What was it like participating in the project?
“The LEI Project was one of the pioneers in Teclógica’s new software development process, using object-oriented analysis and programming and the Enterprise Architect (EA) tool for documentation. The concepts of interactive and incremental development were also used in this project, which enables the validation of programs by the user in early stages, allowing potential problems to be identified and resolved at the beginning of the project. I acted in the role of lead project analyst, responsible for identifying and specifying the requirements gathered with the user, distributing tasks to the other analysts and developers, testing, homologation, and system deployment at the client site. It was very rewarding to participate in this project, which held high expectations for Teclógica. I was able to contribute all my experience as an analyst so that this project would achieve its objectives and serve as a basis for the company’s future projects.”
2. Were your expectations for this work met?
“I was very satisfied, and all expectations were met. We managed to deploy the project within the planned deadline and budget. We validated the software development process and, most importantly, the client was extremely satisfied with the system.”
3. How was the interaction with the client? Did this contact help achieve the objectives outlined for the project?
“The client actively participated in a large part of the development stages. Initially, we held meetings to define the scope, conducting interviews with users to gather the requirements that the system should support. Soon after, the requirement detailing stage began. We talked with users to identify all the functionalities that should be implemented in each of the requirements. After construction and testing, we started the system homologation process with the users, and subsequently performed the deployment. Contact with the client is always very important; they are responsible for defining exactly the functionalities that the system must contain. Furthermore, after the system is ready, they are the ones who must validate everything that was built and give their final approval.”
4. Of the stages you worked on, which one did you like the most and why?
“All stages of a project are important, but the stages I like the most are two. The first is the requirement detailing stage, because this is when the analyst uses all their experience, skill, and creativity to bring the system to life, defining functionalities, creating alternatives, and presenting solutions so that the system is developed according to the user’s expectations.
The second is homologation, because this is when you see the system working, in the client’s hands, and realize if their expectations were met. There is great satisfaction when the client uses the system and is pleased with what they are seeing, knowing that the system will assist them by making their workday more productive.”
