Cordbex: Price Manager Case

Price Manager

US based consulting company

Retail industry

18 man-months duration

Situation

A worldwide leader in the management consulting with more than 100 offices with 14 000 employees across the world. The company provides services like building business strategy, providing instructions to efficient company reorganisation and acquisition.

The client was developing new innovative approach of setting and managing prices. Our team of experts was turned to help in creating software that would help companies to facilitate efforts of price setting for products and services with the help of Big Data solution.

Our Tasks

For that moment the part of functionality was already implemented by client’s tech team and the customer had major objectives:

Develop application in the shortest term

Implement user friendly web interface

Increase performance of current functionality

Integrate the application with the internal system

Solution

As a technical partners our experts immediately began to work on defined tasks.

Develop application in the shortest term

Our team started with detailed clarification of business values, goals and requests of the client. After gathering the all necessary information our tech specialists cooperated with the client’s developers in strengthening efforts to implement not only quality designed but valuable product.

We worked according to the agile methodologies so the client had an opportunity to see the results of our work and how his project looked, that was just a piece of paper that was turning into a real product.

Increase performance of current functionality

For second task our developers figured out that the application performance started to suffer because of redundant system requests and ill-conceived way of data operation processes. We figured out possible risks of low system latency, explained to the client what they might lead to and how we were going to resolve that issue.

Our architect and development team conducted the investigation of possible solutions and after all we took a decision to rewrite data manager module considering all details that we found during investigation. In the end this decision helped to improve the performance of the software by 50% with the all enabled features.

Implement user friendly web interface

The creating of easy to use interface can be challenging, and our team of UI developers knew what difficulties could have been faced if some detail had been missed. They began with mockups and discussing future functionality with customer in order to create interface that could be easily extended with new items. The client could select between several options that our designers provided to him.

When the best mockup was chosen our developers started to work on solution that could be not only user friendly, but also be informative and have great usability on phone and tablet platforms. When the all work was done the web interface with straightforward way to explore and manipulate data was delivered to the client.

Integrate the application with the internal system

One of crucial features of the application is using analytics data and services from customer’s internal system. Client wanted additional functionality to maintain user roles and groups, administrate the application through internal system and synchronize data between them.

The security was one of the major requirement for building the application integration. We developed secured bridge between the internal system and the application that used microservices and industry standard authorization protocol. The functionality of the internal system was extended in order to meet needs of integration process and workflow was carefully tested to ensure the quality of the integration solution.

Result

The biggest challenge for the client was building the product in short terms that had small delay between a user’s click and a response from the system with all planned features. The low latency was one of the key points to differentiating their product among other competitors. As a result of our cooperation the customer achieved that goal by the deadline and the product was successfully delivered.

Customers

For the client this product added 15 new customers.

Service level

The customer significantly upgraded the amount and quality of his services.

Opportunities

The client expanded the sphere of influence and opened new business opportunities.

Our cooperation with the customer brought unique experience, valuable skills and interesting knowledge for both of us.

Technical Details

Technologies

Java
Spark
AWS S3
MemSQL

Key Aspects

The application is a data analysis tool with rich web interface that processes and manipulates dozens of gigabytes of data in real time. All data is stored on AWS cloud which is processed with the help of Apache Spark stream. After processing, data is loaded into a distributed in-memory warehouse MemSQL. A user operates with graphical tools on the web interface where he can observe various representation of data, create and manage price plan.