Posted by Peter Vanbroekhoven on Jun 16, 2008

A month ago we were contacted by a teacher at Avans Hogeschool asking if they could use our ReviewNG DRP environment in one of their courses. We are always working to perfect our products, so we were happy to have our online distribution planning software subjected to the scrutiny of a group of university students. It turned out to be an interesting experience for both them and us, so be sure to read on.

Avans Hogeschool is the union of three universities of applied sciences in the Netherlands. We were contacted by a teacher at the branch in Den Bosch, asking if they could use our online environment in the coming weeks for one of their courses. Ten students were to use the system in a few general sessions under a teaching assistants guidance, and later on their own. Their main task was to try and use Reviewng DRP to get usable results, evaluate the software, and write up a report on it.

Rather than having them use our environment at https://demo.reviewng.com, we decided to set up a custom environment on Amazon EC2. Besides the fact that that one machine at demo.reviewng.com probably cannot hold out against ten students’ bashing, an environment on EC2 provides them with some important benefits.

The advantage to Avans is that we can give the teaching assistants admin access so they can do user management themselves and they have access to all the students’ sessions to help them fix problems remotely. The advantage to us is that we can easily scale the environment according to their needs, allowing us to easily control the quality of service we offer to Avans.

During their first session, we set up 3 EC2 instances, one for each major component of the application. This turned out to be more than enough to accommodate 10 parallel users, so during their second session we used only 2 instances which still proved sufficient. After their second session they were supposed to use the system on their own, so we scaled the setup down to one instance. Also, we could take the environment down when the students were not expected to use the system. This flexibility is what makes EC2 so great for developers and users alike.

Meanwhile, we have received the students’ evaluation of Reviewng DRP, and as expected we got mixed results. We’ll start with the negative points first, so we can finish with the positive ones (people with short attention spans are advised to read the positive ones first, though ;-). Negative experiences were:

• The application is very complex: a lot of configuration without a clear indication of what every configuration option does exactly.
• The guide we provided them with didn’t go into enough detail to fully understand the application.
• Some people found the web environment unfamiliar and prefer a standard (Windows) application.
• There are some bugs still. Some of these caused the background tasks to seem to run very slow, blocking further calculations and causing an extra negative user experience.
• It is not clear if the application can be extended to include more options to more accurately model a distribution network.

Positive experiences included:

• In the end, most students got the hang of the application and were able to get workable results.
• The application has a clean interface with a clean separation between the different parts of the application and without overly complex views.
• The workflow progress indicator is very helpful in guiding the user through a review session.
• The tables and graphs provide a good overview of the data.
• Although a DRP application can be given huge amounts of options to model a distribution network up to the shrink-wrap level, we have picked the right options to make the application usable.
• One pair of students allowed us to pass a comparison with Microsoft Dynamics unscathed :-)

Additionally, the students advised us to provide content-sensitive help inside the application itself.

Generally, we are quite happy with their feedback. On the one hand, they assured us that we didn’t mishit the ball completely.

On the other hand, they confirmed what we already suspected, namely that a DRP system is a complex thing. If we want to have Reviewng DRP used by, so to speak, all small family breweries of which we have many of here in Belgium, we still have a lot of road to travel to allow the application to better guide the user. Ideally, laymen should be able to start right away doing useful calculations with Reviewng DRP without having to read long and tedious manuals first. That is our ultimate goal!