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LeasePlan - by Andy Paterson, Technical Director

"I need this business critical system yesterday. It’s a huge new client opportunity for us and they've just sacked one of our major competitors who couldn't deliver ..."

That was more or less the situation when LeasePlan called Information Systems with an urgent request. Could we build them a non standard company car lease scheme tailored to their client's needs, including full tax calculations and a unique document set? In four weeks flat! Oh, and by the way some of the tax calculations have still to be finalised between our client and the Inland Revenue.

What LeasePlan needed was a system that would take the basic vehicle cost calculations generated from their mainframe and add additional tax calculations and then produce these within the document set their client had specified. They wanted a throw away quick fix solution while a longer term web based solution was being developed.

LeasePlan originally suggested an Excel/Access approach. I countered with an SQL Server/Visual Basic approach as being more flexible and functional.

This was one of those situations where the initial brief was minimal in the extreme. The business processes to support the work were still under discussion. So the nearest we could come to a real brief was a spread sheet showing examples of the additional calculations and brief descriptions of the input available from the LeasePlan main frame.

My approach was to work directly with the business manager at LeasePlan who owned the project. I built a prototype of the application then together we worked on the outstanding tax calculations as they became available, and the document set. We worked directly on the program code by-passing the normal design specification stages. As the goal posts moved, we moved with them.

The system was delivered on time and from day one it enabled LeasePlan to deliver a high quality service to their new client with minimum extra effort from LeasePlan staff.

Business benefits to LeasePlan. A very happy major new client. LeasePlan's reputation for agile and responsive service hugely enhanced. Bonus. The system has now been modified to support two other new clients each with non standard corporate lease schemes.