Full fleet management can be performed including reporting, accessing images of important documents, ordering vehicles, vehicle comparisons, managing driver information, personal settings and other management functions.

ePlan allows clients to manage their fleet in a way that is consistent with their own organizational business model. Access roles can be set up to allow clients to give specific viewing and/or editing rights to specific users. There are also security settings which allow users the ability to access specific information based on their user identity settings.

The electronic solution received full support from the operations and executive management teams because it allows the client and LeasePlan, as their provider, to further develop a strong business relationship. It also allows clients to maximize their fleet's capabilities and cost structures.

There was some opposition from internal groups that didn’t clearly understand ePlan and the value it could bring to clients.

We have internal users [employees within our own company] and external users [our clients] who use ePlan. The development of ePlan is under a continuous development cycle with direct input from our clients and prospects so that LeasePlan is continually working to meet the needs of the market.

For example, if a client has an idea to further enhance a particular functionality within ePlan, LeasePlan has a team that reviews the request and then looks at how that request might affect all clients. LeasePlan then contacts other clients who have participated in past projects for development, to verify agreement or disagreement with the proposed request.

In most cases, LeasePlan proceeds forward with the request for enhancement. The client submitting the idea becomes a part of the development team and assists in testing the new enhancement. Once testing is validated, LeasePlan verifies the functionality of the new enhancement with the client as well as internal testers. Once those are complete and the client signs off on the enhancement, LeasePlan introduces the change to all clients utilizing ePlan.

Since ePlan is a continuous development process, there are times when challenges occur with implementing recommended enhancements. When those challenges are identified, the LeasePlan team responsible for managing development takes the issue to the appropriate areas of the business or the client for further clarification or information. Communication is critical to address challenges and/or acquire the tools necessary to resolve the issue (hardware-related tools, for example.)

Overall, ePlan's goals at the strategic level have not changed. The tactical objectives have changed from time to time to better align the product with client and market feedback. LeasePlan is always working to meet our clients’ changing needs.

ePlan employs the Rational Unified Process in software development which uses a disciplined approach to assigning tasks and responsibilities to the development team. It uses industry "best practices" in every aspect of software development - from the inception of requirements, to analysis and design, implementation, testing and deployment.

New functional requirements are being managed by LeasePlan’s Business Excellence group, comprising of a project chairperson, business analysts, and IT personnel. This ensures every requirement of the product meets a specific business need. The requirements are further organized as cases for greater completeness and consistency. They also provide a better understanding of the importance of a requirement from a user's perspective. All requirements are documented using the LeasePlan Business Requirement Template in Microsoft Word format.

Once functional requirements are reviewed and approved, high-level analysis and designs are created to ensure seamless integration with the current system architecture. Development iterations are defined, whereas each iteration will undergo detail analysis and design, implementation, integrations, test and deployment.

Each iteration is further divided into smaller development activities, enabling the project manager to assign these activities to developers for parallel development and ease of integration, making it faster process to complete. These granularities also enable the project manager to select specific subsets of completed and tested changes to be integrated with the existing application, therefore, accommodating re-prioritization of changes as they occur in the business.

Rational XDE is used to generate UML analysis and design models. WebSphere Application Development Studio, an Eclipsed-based IDE, is used to develop codes, while using CheckStyle plug-in to ensure all development codes conform to the LeasePlan defined coding standards.

ANT is used to deploy the application to the Developer Integration Test Server, the QA Server, Client Test Server and Production Server.

JUnit and LoadRunner are the tools used for testing. LoadRunner is used for acceptance, full regression, and load test of a build while in QA. Results from these tests are saved for benchmarking and comparisons with previous builds.

Before, during and after the development.

Yes.