Portfolio

Customer

A software company providing ad hoc solutions for ultimate web surfing experience free of the excessive use of third-party applications. The Customer’s powerful assets help to socialize and manage media content both online and offline.

Challenge

With understanding and compassion for the frustrations of end-users navigating among numerous media apps and services, the Customer conceived an all-in-one web browsing application specifically suitable for music connoisseurs, video lovers and people with an active online presence. Our task was to create a Mac version of the browser and to implement a system of updates for Windows and Mac. Other challenges faced by Our team included an auto-updates subsystem which is user-friendly and highly customizable as well as a solution for torrents managing from the browser.

Solution

The team working on the Project originally consisted of six seasoned developers and the total work log has already amounted to 220 weeks. Over this time the adaptation of the Chromium-based browser for Mac has been successfully accomplished and a custom Mac installer has been created.

To keep the browser on the cutting edge of technological trends a system of updates and an auto-updates subsystem for Windows and Mac have been implemented.

One of the unique features of the Product is its ability to support and manage torrent downloads directly from the browser, with lightning speeds and the intuitive interface making for delightful user experience.

Another distinguishing feature of the browser is the single access point integration with all the major social networks and content sharing platforms. The Customer´s designated music service has been integrated in the Product via add-ons, web and desktop apps.

Our Team has also created a special Launcher for Windows which allows the browser users instantly access their favorite bookmarks, page view history and the pages they frequent directly from their desktops in a single click.

Results

As a result the Product has seen several releases with all the required features being implemented and after 2 years the team of five specialists continues to improve the user experience and the Product performance by regularly delivering updates and new features. Now the browser is successfully competing among the market leaders with more than 10 mln monthly active users.

Technologies and Tools

To provide for high up-to-date UX, performance, and security standards, the Chromium browser’s framework has been extensively customized and extended with C++ libraries such as libtorrent-rasterbar library, cryptographic tools such as Crypto++ and OpenSSL, and HTML / JavaScript for internal pages. Windows Service and Mac Daemon were developed for the auto-update subsystem of the Product.

To ensure sustainability and flexibly demands of the Customer’s growing and changing needs the project is being developed on the Time & Materials model and Agile methodology.

Customer

The Customer is a conglomerate with multi-million revenue that runs 15+ diverse businesses and deals with over 200 world-famous brands. The company operates in such areas as engineering, logistics & inventory, automotive industry financial consulting (for banks, investment companies, etc.), retail, food & beverage, advertising and more.

Challenge

The Customer’s businesses had independent IT infrastructures. Thus, operational data was isolated across multiple CRMs, ERPs, POSs and ecommerce solutions, supply chain management systems and other enterprise systems. As a result of disintegrated data, the Customer encountered a number of inconveniences:

• Manual data transferring led to errors and hindered data reliability. Moreover, the data wasn’t available immediately as manual inputs were bound to employee schedule.
• The employees couldn’t quickly get a complete picture of all customer interactions with the business.
• There was no ability to implement an advanced conglomerate-wide loyalty program.
• Automatized reporting embracing all business directions was impossible.

Solution

Assessing the existing needs and problems

Our consulting team started with a thorough examination of the Customer’s applications. During several Q&A sessions with the senior management of each business, our consultants identified existing business processes, information flows, technical details of communication protocols, data formats in use and the required data refresh rates.

Having assessed the revealed problems in the examined processes, Our IT consultants suggested integrating the applications and systems in use to make the Customer’s IT infrastructure better serve the current business needs.

The integration solution had to unite dozens of enterprise software components from 6 industries of different natures. Among them were several CRMs, several ERPs, web and mobile ecommerce solutions, multiple point-of-sale systems (POSs), supply chain management systems, several databases, reporting and analytics tools and more.

The integration architecture pattern had to connect applications placed both on-premises and in the cloud, and support different data formats (text, media, etc.). It was required to handle sync and async messaging, batch processing and support RFC (Remote Function Call) communication, while ensuring the IT infrastructure’s high performance and preserving its flexibility.

Developing application integration architecture

The team of Our IT consultants offered to implement a layered architecture. The suggested architecture pattern included 4 layers, each fulfilling its specific role and functions:

• Points of initial data entry (included CRMs, ERPs and other enterprises systems of different purposes).
• The integration layer (mediator) – responsible for data extraction, transformation into the needed format, enhancement, and routing. It was decided to extract data directly from source applications since data processing in the data warehouses adversely affected the data veracity and the process velocity.
• Single and consistent data storage (with thought-out data access and encryption) – responsible for storage and processing of operational and analytical data.
• The Business Intelligence (BI) layer – responsible for data analytics, reporting and visualization.

The layered architecture was chosen as it enabled:

• Isolate future changes within one layer.
• Allow functionality re-use (from the lower layers).
• Eliminate security concerns.
• Make the conglomerate-wide IT system more understandable, simplify its testing and maintenance.

The proposed integration was based on ESB (enterprise service bus) and/or ETL (extract, transform, and load) services to allow for two strategies of smooth data exchange. ESB should be responsible for quick and relatively lightweight operations (messaging) between a data source and another data source or the underlying layer. ESB handled message routing, message exchange monitoring, message storage and message format validation.

ETL (extract, transform, and load) tool should be mostly responsible for loading massive amounts of data. ETL dealt with the transformation of structured and unstructured data into usable forms, data cleaning (by applying advanced validating rules), master data management and loading transformed data into the data warehouse.

Evaluating and comparing technology options

As a part of the IT consulting service, we described, assessed and compared four different tech stacks. The options arose from the Customer’s partnerships with IT providers and tech prevalence in the existing IT infrastructure. They included:

• Option 1 – integration based on the SAP tech stack and SAP Process Integration (ESB).
• Option 2 – integration based on the Microsoft tech stack and Confluent for Kafka / Azure Service Bus (ESB-centered).
• Option 3 – integration based on the Microsoft tech stack and Talend Data Fabric (ETL-centered).
• Option 4 – integration based on the Microsoft tech stack, Talend Data Fabric as ETL and Talend ESB.

In view of the Customer’s cloud migration strategy and plans to introduce IoT and social media streaming, the options included either cloud-ready solutions (Option 1 and 4) or those requiring minimal efforts for migration to the cloud (Option 2 and 3). ScienceSoft consultants highlighted the recommended architecture option for each way.

Reporting

Our IT consultants prepared comprehensive descriptions and assessments of each proposed integration scenario. They included the integration design and integration guidelines, data extracting & loading, data processing operations, data quality & master management, data storage structure. They also provided detailed recommendations on the overall infrastructure design, rated the strengths and weaknesses of each tech stack, listed available connection types. All the needed tools were compared against key parameters and expected costs of ownership.

In addition, we described the potential risks related to the layered architecture and came up with the mitigation plan for each of them.

As the integrated enterprise applications had to deal with sensitive personal and business data, our IT consultants also described data security strategies for each proposed integration pattern in the report.

Results

The Customer obtained four comprehensively described and assessed integration scenarios and tech stacks for the quick and effective consolidation of the conglomerate’s data. All four action plans allowed for having clean, accurate and consistent data, timely available and moved safely across different systems.

To support the company’s growth and scalability, the suggested integration option allowed for the smooth introduction of new components at minimal extra cost.

Methodologies

Q&A sessions, functional decomposition, business requirements analysis, comparative analysis.

Customer

The Customer is a UN-based group of companies present in the variety of industries including luxury retail, hospitality, and eCommerce. An utmost experience and a tailor-made approach to clients are the cornerstones of the Customer’s business philosophy.

Challenge

The Customer approached Our for a comprehensive solution encompassing efficient customer and operations management.

The Customer used to rely solely on the professionalism and communicative skills of their team to maintain excellent customer service at each company separately. However, they matured to enter the next level of a highly personalized approach to clients within their whole ecosystem. This called for a unified client base that gives access to all-embracing client information. As companies managed by the Customer exist separately, the main challenge has been to centralize real-time data flows.

As a part of a targeted top-of-the-line client service, the Customer needed a loyalty program to award clients by purchase volume and frequency.

Along with improving the quality of client communication, the Customer sought to automate some daily activities. For example, they needed a smart solution for case management to avoid the risk of overlooking client issues due to human error.

Also, the Customer needed a handy tool for efficient operations management to gain greater visibility into daily operations.

Solution

To meet all the business needs, Our Team proposed Microsoft Dynamics CRM implementation. The project team focused on two key tasks – to customize the platform in line with all the Customer’s requirements and solve the challenge of centralizing data from multiple sources.

Striving to make the customer service personalized for clients, convenient for the staff, and transparent for managers, we came up with the following functionality:

• A comprehensive CRM profile houses available client information delivered by enterprise systems (like contact details, wish lists, orders) and entered by the Customer’s team members (like client’s character traits, behavioral characteristics, personal style).
• Automated case management is achieved by creating customer service teams in the CRM and adding assignment and escalation rules for case flows.
• We created experience surveys sent to clients automatically after their interaction with companies. To let the Customer get direct feedback on their service while remaining non-intrusive for clients, We provided for a convenient way of conducting surveys by email and the possibility for the staff to turn off surveys in a CRM profile.
• A two-step loyalty program was implemented to maintain an appropriate level of exclusivity for luxury retail. The CRM system automatically assigns scoring levels based on the predefined criteria, then sales teams check the levels in clients’ profiles and reward them accordingly.
• Referrals serve as an internal communication channel for the Customer’s businesses. When needed, they inform one another about clients’ needs and interests, book services and ensure that clients are welcomed as long-awaited guests.

Operations management benefits from CRM implementation due to the following functionality:

• A set of calendars (business facility, personal, working hours and business).
• Goal setting and management functionality.
• Personal dashboards for sales activity monitoring.
• Facility management for storing comprehensive information about the infrastructure.

To enable data centralization from multiple sources into one CRM system, we offered to implement a data warehouse (DWH). There, the data gets integrated, cleaned, and unified to be further transferred to the CRM.

There are two scenarios of how different data types get to the DWH:

• The data from a customer profile (full name, gender, contact details, etc.) arrives immediately in the DWH. Some third-party systems deliver the data using the push method. With others, the DWH pulls the data at a predefined schedule.
• Meanwhile, there are separate staging databases for electronic systems of each company that collect raw transactional data on an hourly basis. After the data gets unified and deduplicated in staging databases, it is exported to the DWH.

Our Team has also created OLAP cubes to provide the Customer with advanced analytics capabilities. Once a day, the data gets exported from the DWH for further analysis. The Customer gets it visualized in dashboards, pre-defined and ad-hoc reports.

Results

With the CRM, the Customer brings their companies under one umbrella. Having their client data centralized and daily processes automated, the Customer upgrades client service within their whole business to a new quality level – team members serve repeat clients and cross-sell more effectively while the risk of human negligence regarding client service is minimized. The Customer builds trust with clients and contributes to their loyalty with bonuses. Business managers get real-time analytics concerning customer management activities and are always up-to-date with current cases, goals, and scheduled activities of their team.

Technologies and Tools

Microsoft Dynamics CRM, MS SQL Server including Microsoft SQL Analysis Services and Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services