Corporate Information System

Client

The client is Aplana Software Services - a rapidly growing Moscow based outsourcing company, member of a leading Russian technology group I.T.Co. The company provides high quality outsourcing services for global customers with a focus on custom software development, maintenance and testing.

Problem Background

The actual customer was a large Russian investment holding that has more than 15 separated businesses with the main company headquartered in Moscow. Every company has its own data management processes, necessary for business workflow maintenance, mainly using standard Microsoft Office facilities and MS Outlook as a mailing service system. So the necessity in a coordination system development has emerged. The system had to provide collection and storage of information and its ergonomic presentation in the form of screen forms with the opportunity to print them.

The main goal of the system's development was providing company management and its juridical, financial and corporate departments with actual present-day data about corporate events in the business units, and also with the information about financial state of projects and subsidiary companies.

It will augment coordination between affiliates, ease tracking of the actual status of important events, allow on-time correction of potential discrepancies and increase efficiency in dealing with scattered business units.

Solution Overview

The application is designed as distributed corporate information system, based on client-server architecture and intranet technologies. It is founded on the "open systems" concept that declares possibility of interaction with other systems and extension based on new functional modules assembly principle.

The system features two primary modules:

• Subsidiaries and their projects management, including;
• Complete subsidiary data registration;
• Custom view templates to easily obtain frequently used sets of data;
• Important events management, such as certain information editing and etc.;
• User actions logging;
• Export of custom view forms to specified MS Office file format for viewing and printing;
• System backups and restore;
• Administration and reference data management, featuring;
• Flexible rights management;
• Assignment of data and actions to Important events;
• Management of reference data with internal validity checks;

The application is based on the .NET Framework 2.0 and use SQL Server 2000/2005 as primary database. System was designed in the way that allows usage of different database servers, such as Oracle, SQL Server due to the creation of its own data access framework (library) based on Microsoft Application Blocks.

Client application was developed as "thick" Windows Forms MDI application with rich user interface and complex business logic, enhanced security, search functionality and dynamic filters. System has good performance characteristics due to profound performance tuning work and caching mechanisms.

Benefits for the Customer

• Time and effort reduction by automating data synchronization - reduces productivity and faster processing time;
• Improved conditions for employees - adoption of a centralized workflow system allows everyone to stay focused on his main tasks in the organization and be more productive.
• Reduction of forms and processing by improving communication and decision support- management can monitor at any moment the activity of all the processes, find pitfalls and optimize the operations.