A team of developers from Cluj and Târgu Mureș has dedicated the last five months to reconfiguring an essential part of CERES, the global workstream management tool that Siemens uses.
In a company like Siemens, which is focused on productivity and efficiency, using the best tools in project management is vital. The CERES application has been developed to centralize all Siemens workflows and connect employees, projects, and databases. CERES application is a monolithic type of application, meaning the challenge is to keep this tool relevant for the company's evolution in all its internal branches. For the booking section, the entire reconfiguration solution was designed and developed by the .msg Romania team.
We're talking about a radical transformation of everything that the booking processes in the CERES application meant. As the main objectives, the developers had to find solutions allowing the modules to offer broader visibility and traceability so that users could enter and track data in the workflow without being restricted by any period.
The biggest challenge was to change everything without changing everything. Although we had to carry out a major migration, we couldn't use newer technologies and had to build over an already existing structure, created in different coding styles, 4 or 5 years ago. Moreover, because the modules in CERES are highly coupled, it was vital that whatever we changed in the booking module did not affect the other application segments, says Alex Săbăduș, who served as an IT Consultant on this project.
Frontend was implemented in the Angular framework, focusing on providing a dynamic and intuitive interface necessary in an application used by thousands of people from different corners of the world. The foundation for the back end was NodeJS, known for its efficiency and scalability; PostgreSQL was used for databases along with TypeORM, all hosted on AWS.
After the initial sprint, which consisted of changing the core mode and defining features that would allow a higher data granularity, a second one followed, in which the team introduced new features. The team achieved all the goals in just five months, a deadline set from the beginning, and met without any issues.
The project allows for new and further developments. Ideally, the application's architecture could be developed on microservices, eliminating problems when transforming a module. Until then, the team from .msg Romania has remained with the experience of having worked on a major, challenging project and with the satisfaction of having made a positive change for thousands of users.