Vertical ERP for Public Administration

REPLY is a group of highly specialized IT companies support leading industrial groups worldwide. Whitehall Reply is the company of the Reply group specialized in the evolution of public administration through innovative technological solutions.

In 2019 Whiteall REPLY started the development of a custom ERP for a major Italian Interprofessional fund, serving several thousand of companies and professionals across the country. The project had very challenging budget and time constraints. After three months spent specifying requirements in the traditional way (mockups and long natural-language documents) the project manager accepted to test the Livebase platform as a candidate solution to accelerate the progress of the analysis and improve its quality and efficiency.

A senior Livebase analyst joined the team and shifted the focus of the preliminary analysis to the definition of a comprehensive data model. This approach, naturally guided by the Livebase Designer, soon established an agreed "glossary of terms" with the customer, which significantly reduced misunderstandings and frictions during the following analysis sessions. Moreover, the data model diagrams worked very well as a visual map on which all the business processes analyzed afterwards could be mapped. Finally, the generation capabilities of the Livebase platform allowed the analyst to release a working prototype of the system right after each modeling session, which helped the customer to verify the modeled requirements interactively rather than reading verbose documents.

After a positive feedback from the customer, the project manager decided to adopt Livebase non just for modeling and prototyping, but also to generate and maintain the backend of the production system. In this perspective, a team of one senior and four junior developers from Whiteall REPLY attended a training crash course on the Livebase platform (8 full-day lessons) , learning the Livebase modeling language, some advanced modeling techniques, the architecture of the generated backend, the framework to code Livebase plugin and the GraphQL API to integrate custom clients and esternal systems.

Five months later, a first version of the ERP system went live, on-time and on-budget. The customer frontend was coded manually in Angular JS, while the backend was generated by Livebase and integrated with plugins coded manually in Java. The back-office frontend was also generated by Livebase. Today, the system is still regularly maintained and extended with new functionality, and Livebase has reliably and generated hundreds of versions of the backend and of the back-office frontend saving uncountable man-months of development, debugging and data-migration effort.