Seeking to gain an advantage in a highly competitive market, Bonhams required a new IT infrastructure that would support a sharp growth curve and reduce transactional costs associated with the auctions. Over five years, Bonhams completed five mergers & acquisitions resulting in an infrastructure that included several disparate legacy systems. To operate and serve clients effectively, Bonhams’ goal was to consolidate the systems into one unified infrastructure providing users with quick and reliable access to centralized data. Bonhams also needed a reliable and scalable solution for Web-based transactions and services.

The challenge was to design and implement a new IT infrastructure capable of scaling quickly enough to support over 300,000 transactions annually without disrupting existing business or increasing IT staffing levels. The business required a standardized platform with Web interfaces for on-line auctions.

Bonhams transformed the auction process from one that traditionally revolved around paper catalogues to an online database accessible to clients worldwide. The streamlined process enables Bonham to make a profit on all transactions. Bonhams' field staff and specialists have anytime, anywhere access to information. Because everything is done dynamically over the Web from one source, clients get exactly the same information as staff.

The unified IT infrastructure significantly improved Bonhams’ business agility and ability to support over 300,000 sales transactions annually with absolute reliability. The cost of processing each item is low enough that profit is made from lower cost transactions. The scalability of the database and applications profitably manages very high-value auctions worldwide, so this project was indeed mission critical for Bonhams’ bottom line.

Bonhams boasts a much lower cost of ownership than other systems in the market, giving them the ability to profitably sell more items than competitors.

Bonhams estimates the cost of developing and deploying the Progress solution was approximately one-fortieth the cost that a leading competitor incurred in deploying its enterprise resource planning applications from SAP. Progress also enabled the system to be deployed in hours rather than days that would have been required with alternative solutions.

Bonhams runs the database without the need of a full-time database administrator, and despite the growth of the business and the growth in the number of employees, the IT staff remains small.

Bonhams’ management strives for ongoing profitability, so they needed a flexible system that enabled continuous improvement across the business. Bonhams also required a system capable of capturing detailed information that allowed them to continuously monitor profitability and support diverse types of sales transactions. The system is accessible to all remote sales locations around the world providing access to information and processing it quickly and reliably.

The auction system is accessed via Web browsers, enabling anyone anywhere in the world to make connections to auctions. Bonhams displays auction information on the Web and prints catalogs on each auction. Bonhams prints more pages than most magazine publishers, so capturing and presenting detailed information on large auctions presents a mammoth data collection task. Bonhams catalogers access the database to enter detailed descriptions of items, which are amassed for each sale and stored alongside digital photographs.

The database—which has over a terabyte of space for images alone—is a single source of information used by all systems. The auction application draws information from the database for presentation via the Web site, and the Macintosh-based desktop publishing systems also extracts information from the OpenEdge database to create the printed catalogs.

The system tracks every item from initial entry into the catalog through settlement. It also builds customer information and histories, allowing Bonhams to proactively market auction items to highly targeted prospective buyers, creating new levels of customer tracking to support target marketing activity according to the interests of our customers. The new system alerts customers requesting the service to the types of sales which match their interests and will automatically generate a letter, fax, or e-mail according to the preferences established by a customer.

The auction system is fully integrated with the OpenAccounts application, providing management with detailed information to track the profitability of auctions and even of individual sales.

Providing the same level of information access and transaction processing that is available at the head office to remote and even temporary locations is a major challenge, but the Web-based applications allow Bonhams to effectively share real-time information.

The main function of the system is to allow for online auctions. All auction information is stored in a central catalog application developed using WebSpeed.

Real-time information is available over the Web and can also be accessed by sales offices around the world.

The technology director sponsored the IT project. He and his team had the full support of management particularly because the new infrastructure would directly impact the bottom line.

NA

The challenges were in:

• electing the infrastructure and the applications
• integrating all the applications under one single infrastructures
• insure reliable delivery of on-line transactions
• and scaling the system all the way to handle 300,000 transactions a year with absolute reliability

No, the project goals were clear and remained consistent.

Progress OpenEdge was used to build a database driven UI and workflow framework enabling the entire UI and most of the workflow to be modified in real time to suit changing business needs.

The framework was built using the "ballistic application development" that the Chief Architect had previously developed for another project. This approach enabled Bonhams to develop an entire ERP application from scratch in 30 man months. Bonhams grew fourfold and was able to make changes to its core business management tool in near real-time.

Other than application and test monitoring using text files, a wiki and spreadsheets for project and testing documentation, no formal testing tools were used. This was highly cost effective as no investment in testing tools was required. Due to the flexibility in architecture and the rate of change, automated tests were unlikely to be repeatable so the human element in testing was unavoidable.

The team strived to slow down the software development cycle continuously since the project went live simply because the continuous pace of change had dramatically outstripped the ability to train end users. Presently, there is an informal life-cycle.

No official software quality program or metrics were used. The pressure to get it right sufficed.

End users were and continue to be the biggest contributors for change requests. They helped to define procedures that were not obvious, and they were asked to test parts of the application with respect to UI and functionality.

Bonhams determined off-the-shelf auction management software and enterprise resource planning [ERP] systems would require customization and significant monetary investment to handle its operational size and global distribution.

Bonhams instead took the in-house development route based around best-of-breed financial and human resource packages, and the Progress OpenEdge environment.

Once its in-house solution was developed, Bonhams started searching for a new platform on which it could run. Bonhams Linux offered the required qualities of scalability and stability.

Bonhams based the new IT infrastructure on the Progress OpenEdge development platform and database. The OpenEdge database, which has over a terabyte of space for images alone, is a single source of information that is used for client services, accounting, human resources, the catalog, and Web transactions.

The infrastructure required a powerful and reliable database in order to leverage automation and improve operational results and business productivity.

The tight integration between the Progress development tools and the database was another important benefit. Bonhams determined that WebSpeed, which provides an integrated environment for developing and deploying Web-based applications, was all that was needed to develop the entire auction system.

Bonhams decided to move to Linux which Progress technology supports.

Bonhams selected CedarOpenAccounts' financial software as the standard for financial accounting. OpenAccounts is accessible via a standard Web browser and offers full support for multi-currency transactions. This is important because Bonhams needs to be able to handle the wide-ranging tax requirements of different countries and of the U. S. states in which it operates. Flexibility is particularly needed to meet the sometimes-difficult demands of tax authorities. OpenAccounts was written using Progress tools and runs on the OpenEdge database platform.

Bonhams acquired ten x360 servers and eight x232 servers. Eight of the x360 servers are running Linux and two are running Microsoft Windows 2000. All of the x232 machines run Windows 2000 and function as file, print and exchange servers.

The core of Bonhams' auction management system runs on the x360 servers--three for Web serving, two for application and database functions, two for images, one for Web-delivered reports, one for disaster recovery and one for development.

The x232 machines operate as local servers in each of Bonhams' UK regional sales locations.

The system required a powerful and reliable database and tight integration between the Progress development tools and the database.

During the course of the project, the team grew from the initial two to the current team of six.

The team also has access to two application trainers (who train users for other third party software and write all of the user documentation), a web and minor utility developer and two MIS managers.

Three of members of the team have considerable experience in software application having been involved with corporate and commercial application development for many years using many languages.

The team included a former Oracle DBA responsible for database integrity checking and for report generation using the Excel and CGI reporting tool.

One of the developers had eight years experience in real time and machine control system but was new to corporate application development.

The web and minor utility developer has five years experience developing web and java script applications.

The system analyst has five years of IT experience and was previously an administrator in another Bonhams' department.

Two trainers have four years of IT experience between them – one had a background in personnel and the other in customer accounts.