Client Technical Solutions
During our 20 years of providing services to clients, here are some of the solutions that we have designed and built to solve complex business challenges.
In each situation, the engagement was to deliver a general service or a business outcome, and these solutions were identified, designed and delivered as part of the consulting engagement.
Master Data System
A Master Data System provides a centralised source of common business data that is used across multiple systems and processes (see Wikipedia – master data management). This solved existing problems and high maintenance costs, and allowed new products or product attributes to be efficiently configured with minimum risk or changes to dependent systems.
Report Generation Platform
The Report Generation Platform is a tool to generate high fidelity reports (eg. PDF or HTML) on a customer facing web platform, combining data from multiple systems/sources, and generating tables, charts and text with advanced typography and pagination features.
Data Repository & Calculation
The Data repository collected and stored data from multiple sources – particularly time-series data for financial instruments. It normalised data, and it supported overlapping data sets (where multiple data suppliers would provide common data points for the same financial instrument).
Database Schema Tool
This tool was created to manage many deployments of a product database, and to automatically generate SQL to migrate databases and/or validate database schemas. The tool supported both SQL Server and Oracle from a single configuration, and could update multiple versions at once.
Database Synchronisation Tool
A common challenge in financial industry systems is to replicate large data sets between databases, while applying common business rules, and preventing issues of data inconsistency or data locking in operational data stores. While it is clearly preferable to use a standard ETL tool in most situations, it is useful to have the option of implementing a customised solution when the demands and efficacy of the problem demand it.
Business Rule Expression Language
Business Rules are prevalent in all software systems, and tailor the solution to the needs of the business. These rules can affect data capture, validation, formatting, processing, display, access and a variety of other functions. While many software systems simply hardcode these business rules into the software, these rules are the most common thing that changes in any system.
Javascript Framework Extensions
One project used the Yahoo (YUI) Javascript framework to render the web UI, and we quickly discovered that we were spending a lot of time hand-coding Javascript to implement common configuration and functionality for each table. The solution was to build javascript framework extensions with server-side tag libraries to reduce development effort and improve efficiency.
File Synchronisation Tool
The File Synchronisation tool copies changed files between multiple servers, and is heavily optimised to perform very quickly on high latency networks with high security restrictions. This tool out-performs numerous other 3rd party synchronisation tools.
Service Request Broker
The Service Request Broker was designed to distribute service requests across multiple interface implementations, and to provide high availability by throttling, monitoring and implementing failover and self-protection features.