1.Organization of the Company

Perception Digital Ltd. was established in 1999. It is a derivative corporation of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. It’s founded by three university professors. Dr. Liao Jiajun is one of them. He was awarded the Hong Kong Young Industrialists Award in 2000. Perception Digital Ltd. began with the development of digital audio MP3's, and now enters into various areas including MP4, mobile phones and health care product. At the same time, it’s achieving great development in the OEM / ODM electronics industry. Its well-known clients include Disney, Philips and SanDisk Corporation. Its scientific researches are awarded many times and there are 28 items of patent technology. The corporation was awarded ISO9001/14001 certification this year.

 2.Requirement on Solution of IT

The IT administrator of Perception Digital Ltd, Mr. Wang said: "The IT sector are not only responsible for maintenance of all the computer systems in the company, but also supports over 100 engineers. Thanks to the company’s fast development, the number of employees has greatly increased from about 60 to more than 300 since 2005. And six or seven product development teams have been set up. Some of them maintain customer relationship and some manage a particular product. Every team reports to a project manager, above whom there is a senior project manager in charge of coordination. Each project manager used to have their own project management tool, i.e. Microsoft Project and some use open-source software, which makes it difficult for integration of management.

 3.Consideration on choosing the Solution of IT

Mr. Wang pointed out, "Our developing director Mr. Xu Chengye and senior project manager Mr. Wu agreed to use a unified project management tool, and otherwise it is unable to calculate the human resource cost of each project. For a while of time, we created a Time Sheet with Excel and the engineers were asked to fill in it. Because of the complexity of individual projects, engineers made mistakes. It took a long time for the Finance Department to collect and analyze the data collected, and no flexibility was allowed. We also tried other open source programs, such as Project-open. But it was not adopted either because of lack of local support. Considering there were no in-house application developers, we finally decided to use ISS Project Management system of Access iVisions Ltd.

 4.Carrying out the Solution of IT very well

Mr. Wang said," At the end of 2007, we participated in the proseminar of popularization of Linux and open-source programming. At the proseminar, we got a chance to know about Access iVisions Ltd and found that they programed with a large number of open-source software. Their price was more competitive. the functions were more flexible than exclusive software. They did not price based on user size, therefore, it’s more appropriate for growing companies like us. Since we had unique requirements on certain features and they should be delivered within a specified period of time, it took more time to negotiate on the implementation of the agreement. In this process, the Hong Kong Productivity Council gave both sides some valuable advice, so that we could successfully reach an agreement. The supplier developed the system in one month and provided us in the way of SaaS. We bought one more server and the system would be fully prepared to transfer the whole system into the open-source database and middleware, and make it run in-house. Both the old and the new systems are running currently in order to test with the realist data."

 5.Good result of the IT Solution

Mr. Wang said, “In the past, we could hardly calculate the cost of human resources. Now that with the ISS Project Management System, employees in both Shenzhen and Hong Kong office can safely enter the number of working hours, activities and progress through Web-based at anytime and anywhere. As the data will be dealt with in a unified format, the project manager can make more objective analysis, judging whether each team and each engineer’s workload is reasonable. A lot of manpower can be saved in calculating the human resources cost, meanwhile, in a more precise manner. And efficiency was enhanced.”

 6.Advices for small and medium enterprises

Mr. Wang Maotan summarized that open-source Software application scheme on the whole has the advantage of lower cost, though in the part it’s not popular due to shortness of marketing and technical support. That’s why small and medium enterprises didn’t show their interest. Actually, more and more open-source softwares are enhancing their development power by adopting a community mode in developing, also they provide non-free commercial support. With the guarantee of the support from the suppliers, small and medium enterprises should feel more worthy giving a try. If they don’t think the free edition of community can satisfy them, they can choose to buy the business support.

The Chinese text of this case shall be deemed the original.

Successful Case