Objective: Assist managers to focus on the most profitable areas of their businesses and take appropriate actions on less profitable or unprofitable areas such as customers, products, division of sales territories, divisions, etc.

Our Assignment: To design, develop and deliver a complete system.

Features: This application was developed for a large plastic manufacturer. The database is periodically fed from the company's main transaction system and an activity base costing mechanism is performed, thus allowing it to build Profit & Loss (P&L) statements at very refined levels. Business managers can analyze their activity, determine and perform appropriate actions after data mining, ad hoc reports and more complex decision support models reveal new information. Several extensions of the system allow the managers to retrofit the company information system into some of the decisions they have made through Business Analyst.

Comments: Development time was extremely short using the Rapid Application Development (RAD) approach. Business Analyst uses a client/server UNIX/MS-Windows Oracle/PowerBuilder environment.

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Objective: Collecting, storing and making available information about all kind of services and service providers for people with disabilities.

Our Assignment: To design, develop and deliver a complete system.

Features: This database was designed and developed for a not-for-profit organization. It can be accessed through a variety of means, including the Internet. The task included designing the database, designing and developing all of the applications and providing powerful database administration features and strong for the support for the system.

Comments: During the design phase, we developed specific mechanisms and procedures to gather accurate and up-to-date information.

Objective: Capture actual production parameters and monitor productions processes. Based on production goals provide production equipment at all workplaces with production orders and appropriate documentation.

Our Assignment: To provide recommendations for database response time and data accuracy improvements.

Features: This customer is one of the largest US manufacturers of plastic film. Our task was to improve their manufacturing process by monitoring production equipment and processes in every work place. The customer had designed, developed and implemented a company wide database application using their own resources; however, after one year in production and several improvements made by the RDBMS supplier, they still had problems with response time and data integrity.

Our mission: To improve & optimize performance, data integrity & data accuracy, using client’s internal resources for developing and coding. This project entailed:

	formulate a detailed description of the current data model, at physical, conceptual and implementation levels.
	completely qualify the slow response time
	completely qualify data integrity problems
	review users priorities and delivery schedules
	redesign the data model to address the qualified items
	develop objective metrics allowing us to measure response times
	before and after improvements
	develop all the "fixes" required - accomplished using the client's
	internal resources
	report the improvements made to management.

For several functions, the response time was divided by a factor of 20 and overall improvement was made by a factor of 7. Regarding data integrity, we did not only resolve discrepancies, but we also introduced new concepts that allowed management to monitor manufacturing yields and losses more closely.

Comments: Our results were praised by both users, management and application developers, in terms of addressing technology transfer, especially as related to database design issues.

Objective: This client designs, develops and markets an expert system used by environmental auditors to conduct audits, document findings and monitor corrective actions. The expert system is used to identify legal requirements applicable to the audited facility and then to evaluate the compliance with the relevant federal law, state regulation and/or good management practices.

Our Assignment: To design the data models of the databases together with the application run-time data structures..

Features: Dakota Auditor collects information related to applicability and compliance of environmental regulations. The auditor enters information to the plant under inspection and based on that information the expert system identifies which laws apply and presents requirements for compliance. Numerous "what if" situations enable the user find the applicable regulations and construct the necessary reports.

Our Mission: To design data models for the database storing the legal issues, the audit database and the application run-time data structures. This effort allowed the client to develop the application in a record time with very small resources. Hundreds of copies of the system were sold within a few months of its market introduction, testifying of the quality of its original design.

Comments: Entity - relationship design method was primarily used to design database models and run-time data structures. Then, a full object oriented approach allowed to develop an object layer on top of the RDBMS database. As a result, software engineers became familiar with this data representation and did not have to switch between techniques when programming database or application code.