From Rebecca Edmonds Marketing Executive Parallax Group Plc London W14
Your news story on the Rover multimedia system (CI No 2,443) which focused on Rover’s Business Process Management Sytem, attributed a number of comments to the managing director of Parallax Solutions, Adrian Irwin. Regrettably, these were not reported accur ately. In addition, the technical overview was wrong. Irwin did not say that Rover car dealers were the least technologically-aware group. He said salesmen who work at the dealerships were not used to technology. This had to be taken into account when Par allax Solutions designed the systesm archi tecture and user interface. This resulted in a system that was extremely user-friendly. The Business Process Management System is not front-ended with Gupta Corp’s SQL Windows. It was developed in Windows and C++. The Gupta product was used in a back-end system, the Product Catalogue Authoring System, which supports the BPMS application. PCAS contains basic information utlised by BPMS, and is stored on CD-ROM. RCMS did not develop the original systems architecture; this role was performed by Parallax Solutions. Parallax Solutions was not formed by Irwin when he left Rover in February 1994. It was set up by Richard Woodfield in 1989. If he had formed the company, the BPMS application would have been developed in four months. In actual fact, the development process has taken two and half years. It is not too early to call BPMS a multimedia system. On the contrary, BPMS has full multimedia capability, complete with video images and sound. Neither is it a static screen display; configurations of Rover vehicle products are presented dynamically on Intel-based PCs.
