Operational Efficiency

Case Study: Re-face legacy portfolio management system

Industry

Financial Services

Problem Statement

The client was a global bank with hundreds of branches and thousands of financial advisors in the United States. The purpose of the portfolio management system is to provide accurate, up-to-date cost basis information in a timely and professional manner.

Challenges

• Existing portfolio management application was a standalone system that required separate access by the users slowing down cost basis adjustments and putting that work out of context from other user daily tasks.
• User interface was based on old technology and did not accommodate new business requirements.
• Old system lacked workflow management which added to processing overhead.

Technical Challenges

• Existing application contains complicated processing logic making full re-write of the back-end cost prohibitive.
• Insufficient documentation for the legacy system.
• Integration into new to the company SOA/BPM ecosystem.
• Integration with new service request processing system.
• New to the company JSF technology on the front end.

How we Helped

• Working closely with the client's business owners we accommodated sophisticated user interfaces with complex validation logic.
• In tight collaboration with the client's development team we were able to reuse most of the back-end data and processing logic.
• Made cost basis adjustment tasks an integral part of the new request processing platform utilizing workflow module and SOA components.
• Leveraged off-shore, highly qualified, 741 Studios workforce while simultaneously maintaining permanent on-site presence of a strong team lead. His role was to communicate with the client on the technical issues and provide guidance to the off-shore team. This worked very well for the project, once again validating our approach and ability to execute the on-shore/off-shore model.

Disciplines

SOA/BPM ecosystem - TIBCO; Web Service layer -TIBCO BusinessWorks; Composite services; Application integration; Services governance; Java 5; Portal - JSF, AJAX; Database - DB2;

Case Study: Broker Desktop for Wealth Management

Problem Statement

When we first engaged with our client, their IT department was taking too long to deliver business functionality; users were forced to interact with too many systems and screens to perform their daily responsibilities; and the client was facing high support and maintenance costs.

Challenges

• Involved massive firm-wide system integration
• First production release to be implemented on a new platform

How we Helped

Worked with existing teams to:

• Implement a new solution based on BPM/SOA integrating over 12 core applications
• Develop user interfaces & UI component libraries based on JSP and JSF
• Establish governance ecosystem of services within 8 months
• Establish service layer based on service bus

Disciplines

Portal - JSP, JSF, AJAX; Java 5; Workflow; Web services - Oracle Weblogic; Services Orchestration on Service Bus; Composite services; Application Integration; Services Governance - IBM

Case Study: Web Trading & Web Site for a Brokerage

Problem Statement

During this particular engagement we were tasked to: gain market share with independent brokers; satisfy institutional users with a highly functional and self-managed self-service web site; facilitate large trades beyond retail users; and to provide mobile access.

Challenges

• Required to deal with different applications with distinct interfaces
• Massive migration effort from legacy systems to new platform

How we Helped

Worked with existing teams to:

• Design and develop ecommerce web site for institutional brokers
• Design and develop web trading platform
• Distribute management of users and entitlements to user designated administrators

Disciplines

Portal - JSP; Java; XML; Java Swing Applet