Technology Management
PROBLEM: The technology team of a fast growing mobile handset insurance business was struggling to deliver the next generation of their customer managment and fulfillment software. The project was late and signficantly overbudget.
SOLUTION: We reviewed the current technology platform, interviewed the stakeholders in all areas of the businesses including call center, point of sale partners, fulfillment, sales, technology and the executive team. Presented findings to the company’s executives that the current version could sustain the business, and the application currently under development replicated the monolithic structure of its predecessor, and from a testing, migration and development perspective had no clear path to a delivery date.
The second version of the application project was ended. We worked with the technology and management team to create a sustainable plan for creating a distributed application including decoupling the applications core components and a plan to develop microservices to incrementally address gaps in its current application.
VALUE: Reduced costs to the business by $20,000 a month in development for version 2, and redirected funds toward building a sustainable application development process for incorporating incremental improvements in the company’s technology infrastructure.
Software Development
PROBLEM: A fast growing digital marketing business needed an innovative solution to capture thousands of invoices and reconcile them against their products and prices.
SOLUTION: We created a custom application written in PHP, Laravel, MySQL and designed in AWS to allow their business partners to directly upload their invoices. These invoices are parsed, calculated and compare against our client’s product databases. The application allows each business partner to review and correct their invoices before final submission.
VALUE: By moving the responsibility of validating invoices from our client to their partner, we saved the accounts receivable team 80 hours a month of labor. Coincidentally due to Covid, the application provided a central hub for the AR team and their partners to manage invoice processing.
Database Performance
PROBLEM: A very busy search site for academic papers would frequently return page errors at peak load times.
SOLUTION: Enabled AWS’s performance insights and slow performing query logs for their RDS Postgres database. Tracked connection reset and timeout errors to instances which were part of a auto scaling group. Instances would frequently spike the CPU without warning when traffic increased. Identified each instance was acting as a task worker for a job queue indexing submissions. Worked with development team to move queue workers to a separate high speed server which reduced CPU spikes on httpd servers allowing them to complete their queries.
VALUE: Significantly reduced page errors at peak load times and reduced load and number of HTTP servers by moving CPU intensive tasks to separate workers.