Projects Snapshot
Better Minds Consulting has executed several IT projects onsite at client locations, offsite from our facility in Carnegie, PA ( in house projects) and offshore ( for our global clients). Here is a snap shot of the IT projects executed by our team since 2005.
- Data Warehousing Projects:
Major Telecom Client - Applications: Bandwidth Is the Score card and Enterprise Accounts are applications that access MR2000 Volumes data warehouse to provide enterprise wide standardized revenue and expense reporting, Business unit view of revenues and expenses and is an Ad-hoc analysis and reporting tool. Due to the growing nature of the business, new data elements are added to the Enterprise Data warehouse for better DSS.
Tasks Performed: Analyzed the existing Teradata applications for complexity and enhancement.Participated in Joint Analysis Design with user community and Business users.Supported the designing, loading, maintaining the Data marts for the Financial Business objects reporting application.Enhanced several existing Mainframe ETL JCL job streams for a large Teradata EDW to incorporate several new data elements.Created numerous BTEQ/SQL scripts, making appropriate DDL changes and completed unit and system testing.Developed new control cards, JCL and PROC library members for data export, data loading and e-mail notification processes.Created tables, access views and update views in the development database for unit and system test.Developed FastExport, FastLoad and Multi Load scripts in unix environment to simulate the environment in development database.Performance tuned Teradata SQL and resolved various spool space issues. Good knowledge in comprehending the explain plans and the join strategies used by the SQL.Used the Teradata OLELOAD utility to export the Data from Oracle to Teradata.Design and development of ETL process using Informatica to load data from file system into the target Teradata database.Analyzed and created Facts, Dimension tables. Created Stored Procedures for data transformation purpose.Coordinated with source system owners, day-to-day ETL progress monitoring, Data warehouse target schema design (Star Schema) and maintenance.Performed unit and system testing for the modified code and loaded shadow data marts for testing prior to production implementation.Prepared low level design documentation for implementing new data elements to EDW.
Client: Federal Agency for Patents and Trademarks
Project: Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW)
Environment: Business Objects XI R2, HP UX server, Oracle 10G
This Project involves the design and development of an Enterprise Data warehouse for the federal agency. The data warehouse was in an operational and maintenance mode. The subject areas include Finance, Payroll, Trademarks, Patents, Human Resources, Revenue and Budget Projection. Users were helped with their Adhoc Queries and requests. New developments were done to generate pay period reports based on various organization levels. Budget projection reports were developed for Trademark Organization. Human resource Subject Area Universe was designed and developed to support adhoc queries of HR department.
Client: Federal Agency for Patents and TrademarksProject: The Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) is built by integrating various business areas such as Finance, Payroll, Revenue, Human Resources (HR), Patents, FPDS-NG, Time and Attendance data and Corporate Planning to support analysis and decision-making within the PTO. The purpose of this project is to provide accurate, complete and readily available data to support the mission of PTO staff, management and senior executives.
Environment: Oracle 10g, SQL*Loader, SQL*PLUS, PL/SQL, SQL, SQL Developer, TORA, Windows XP, HP UX 11.11, Business Objects XI R1/R2
Tasks Delivered:
- SAP Projects:
Client: Technology company, and the world's largest semiconductor chip maker.
Environment - SAP 4.6., ECC 600, SAP SCM 5.10
Client: Manufacturer of test equipment for the global semiconductor industry
Client: Worldwide leading provider of medical devices and services.
Project: POSSIS Integration and Unicode Migration. -SAP 4.7EE & ECC6.0; SD, MM, FI Modules
Phase – 1: As part of the integration, necessarily numerous interfaces are required to be built and developed for data exchange between both the systems and bring them to the same page. Phase – 2: On completion of Integration, there will be an Up gradation of the system to ECC6.0.
SD Reports: Reports / Interfaces to extract Customer Master data (Create / Change), Invoices Transaction data Shipments transaction data and Sales Orders data from SAP for POSSIS database, which will provide options to Download to a PC and UNIX Server.
FI-Co reports: Report to calculate all the amounts of the entire cost element for a given for a given cost center and repost a debit and credit entry into Offset Accrual and P&L accounts. This program runs a BDC for FB01 transaction to repost the entries.
HR Reports: Report / Interface to extract benefits data in a file to be sent to pharma for drug benefits. This uses Info types 0000, 0002, 0006, 0021, 0106, 167 for data extract.
BI/BW Developments: Developed a function module to access BI query for sales forecast Vs. Actuals report. Developed few Start Routines & Transformation Routines for BI mapping rules according to business logic. Debug the ABAP Routine codes during data loads (DTP Simulation).
User-Exits: Designed and Implemented an USER-EXIT for transaction IE01 to validate the material serial Numbers and allow only permissible characters.
Smart forms: Designed and developed a form to send a letter of quote for a specific order type for specific equipment.
Up gradation / Migration: Involved in UNICODE Migration project from SAP 4.7EE to ECC6.0
Client: Technology Company and the world's largest semiconductor chip maker
Environment: SAP NW PI 7.0, MDM 5.5, ECC 6.0, SCM
Design and Develop SAP XI Interfaces. Engage client Forward Engineering team for Architecture. Understand IT landscape for CCPRe integration. Document project deliverables, milestones. High Level design documentation. Technical Specifications. Unit Test Plan. System landscape definitions. Security requests. Effort Estimation, High Level design document. Design and Implement core testing strategy. Mitigate risks, Code Review and process improvements. Status reporting, work plan and issue tracking
Client: Global leader in Power Conversion Engineering
Project scope: FI CO New Implementation, Post production support; SM; ECC 6.0
Tasks delivered: Implemented the new company code. Configured sub modules are FI- New GL, AP, AR, FA, CO- CCA and PCA. Worked on post production support, configuration and enhancements in FI-CO. Resolved Issues related to milestone billing, SD, PS, WIP calculations. Requirement gathering and development of various custom reports by user requests. Trained and Assisted end-user in various business process and performing the month end closing activities.
Project Description/Scope: SAP solution, ECC 6.0, Design/Configuration
- Oracle ERP Projects:
Environment: Financial Modules of Oracle Applications 11.5.10.2, Custom PO, OM application
Scope of work: The scope of the project encompasses support and implementation in development-cum-test and production instance.
- Application Support – Troubleshooting standard issues and applying data fixes
- AppsDBA Support - Applying patches
- Implementation of new modules
- Educating users of the standard functionality
- Providing workarounds for meeting the client requirement
- Enhancement and Extension to the application
- Customization of applications
- Development of interfaces and troubleshooting in reports and interfaces
- Development of Reports on homegrown PO, OM applications
- Creating Service Request with Oracle Product support and follow-up of TAR till issue resolution by uploading necessary data, Collaborating Web Conferences, applying the solution provided by Oracle in Development-Cum-Test instance and then to production instance.
- Peoplesoft Projects:
Client: Public Sector ( State agency )
Project: Peoplesoft Financials Training
Tasks delivered: IT services and Peoplesoft Financials Training to state agency employees. Used state agency delivered materials and user productivity kit to develop UPI modules
- Provide functional training - PeopleSoft Financials - General Ledger-/Commitment Control, ePro – Purchase Orders and Requisitions, Receivables – Cash applications. Tools: UPK, I-Linc, with classroom instruction
- Service desk – Post go-live production support for Financials. Tools: Lotus Notes, i-Link
- Java Projects:
Project:Beacon CMS is a Java Swing application used internally by customer service to manage interactions with external customers. It provides a 360 degree view of a customer by aggregating information from several other systems. Beacon communicates with its internal (Oracle) and multiple other external databases (SAP, Firstwave, Pivotal etc) via Webservices.
Environment: Java 1.6, Java Swing, JIDE, Subversion, Apache Log4J, Apache XMLBeans, Apache POI, Oracle BEA stack, MyEclipse 8.0
Tasks Delivered: Work with Layout Managers such as GridBag layout, Group layout and Table layout to create GUI forms.Use JFormDesigner for rapid creation of GUI forms and components.Export result of database queries into Microsoft Excel documents using Apache POI library.Use Observer/Listener patterns and Swing Worker to invoke updates on Swing components.Use components from the JIDE framework to provide additional UI capabilities.Write code to interface with Webservices using Apache XMLBeans and SDOs.Write unit test to ensure proper communication with the backend data services.
Client: Manufacturing ( Rolled Products)
Environment: Struts 1.2, EJB 3.0, XML, XSLT, JSP, JSTL, Servlets, Servlet, JSP,JSTL, JReports, SOAP, AJAX, JQuery UI, DB2.
Designed and wrote an application with role based user access to modify and report various business objects. This application was created for power user with some understanding of underlying data so as to update and view data in report format for day-to-day MIS activity. Also wrote few reports using Jreports (using both its Designer and customized reports using published api’s) based on business requirement. Currently, involved in requirement gathering for phase-wise implementation of a Hotline production support application namely Quintec.
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Designed/Developed a web based solution using Struts, EJB, JSP, XML, Jquery, DB2.
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Role based access rights to user table or few columns in table for added flexibility to power users.
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Develop and rewrite number of reports in JReports using either its Designer or creating UDS using its api’s and java.
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Involved in discussions for plant-wise implementation of Quintec software for Hotline production support.
- Microsoft / .NET / SQL Server / BI Projects:
Application: eBill Notification: The eBill application is designed around four primary actors, identified by the four primary activities performed by the system.
1. File retrival - this activity group encapsulates the set of functionality necessary to get files from a given FTP server and store the content locally. A primary concern here is the risk of retriving the same file multiple times, hence indexing the list of downloaded files is paramount.
2. File decompression - this activity group focuses on the simple process of decompressing the files, which comes in zip format into the underlying XML within.
3. Email acquisition - this activity group focuses on converting the account associated with a given record into a set of valid email addresses associated with that account. A secondary activity here performs extracting the individual records from the XML batch(which comes together and storing them seperately)
4. email sending - this is a simple fire and forget activity which utilizes the EMS services for sending out the emails for a specific account.
One of the primary risk associated with the overall workflow stems from the inherent associative dependencies that exist between the individual activities (identified above as usecase). In short, a file must exist to download it, it must be downloaded to decompress it, it must be decompressed to tokenize it, etc. Exceptional conditions in the overall processes while begin in and of themselves may have far reaching impact on associated tasks. If for instance, the decompression mechanisam utilizes more memory then the processes needed to be ocassionally recycled, notification which is a relatively straightforward and lightweight would suffer backlogged, emails would have to wait for the process to recycle to begin processing. It is therefore necessary for these activites to run seperately and use either event driven or temporal mechanisams to schedule work. As memory issues are not solved by threading, this approach would not be a sufficient host boundary for the actor activities, similarly application domain though they can be recycled to reclaim memory, suffer from an inability to isolate and recover from unhandled exceptions propagated out of the hosted domains. This ultimately leads to the same coupling issues outlined above. To provide ultimate resilience and automacy among the various workers, a worker process boundary must be used to isolate each activity set. The eBill sender notification design will utilize processes to enforce this constraint.
Top 100 Healthcare Client:Project: Payer site Web-Scraping
Environment: ASP.Net 3.5, VB.Net, ADO.Net, SQL Server 2005, MS Project
Tasks completed: Worked with Business Analysts for requirement analysis. Project planning, estimation and management, Risks and developing Risk Management Plans. Study the existing surrounding system and proposed various design solution to senior architect. Built custom scripts to capture data contained within payers data
source web sites. Developed custom business rule engine system and implemented it to detect data source web page change. Employed agile methodologies, especially Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) and SCRUM, to ensure rapid iterative software development. Developed tool to monitor operations of scripting applications and proactively detect anomalies. Created test plans and QA strategies for testing. Work with existing application teams to deliver content as per the .net standards. Business data parser logic architecture design, development and geared for plug-in based integration of future upgrades and revisions. Database modeling, table design, stored procedure design. Coordinated with application team and worked with test-driven development (TDD) strategies to optimize system quality and to enable rapid refactoring. Coordinated with Quality assurance group for issue tracking, issue escalation and resolution. Change management, technical support to the team and monitoring progress through weekly status report. Post project deployment; worked with team to gather evaluation of success criteria, best practices, lessons learned, Root cause analysis document and strategies for future releases and deployments. Client Liaison and Weekly meeting
Client: Healthcare Facility
Projects: As IT services provider of choice, we have implemented several applications using Microsoft / .NET, clinical ERP, Oracle and SQL Server databases and Business Intelligence / reporting tools. Projects have been executed onsite, offsite as in house development to support our client needs on a continualn basis.
Tasks Deliverd: Define and document business requirements, business process flows and diagrams. Research and prioritize user requirements and functional needs. Create use cases using UML and map functionality to system components . Develop system test plans and test scripts, user acceptance metrics. Facilitate stakeholder interviews to gather business/functional requirements. Liaise between the business units, technology teams and support teams.
- Power Builder Projects:
Environment: PowerBuilder 9.0.2, PFC Framework, MS SQL Server2000, MS Office 2000, SQL Developer
- Clinical Applications / Clinical ERP Projects:
Project: Keane Care Generic Migration from VistaKEANE to KNS
Tasks Delivered: Keane Net Solutions - Full cycle tasks from pre and post implementation, total project management / Planning / test server executions / roll out / End user training - both Clinicals and RAM - total planning and execution / follow up
- Mainframe Projects:
- Database / Database Administration Projects:
Client: Nation's oldest federal cultural institution and research arm of Congress.
Project Title: Archiving LOC data as XMLTypes in DB tables, using XMLDB
Environment: Oracle 9.2
Project description: Archiving LOC data that is present in the Database tables into XMLTypes in the Database, as per the XML schema standards, Creating XMLTypes, Validating the schema using Oracle XMLDB, Logging any errors.
Tasks: Writing SQL Scripts to creates XMLTypes, Validate XMLTypes, logging errors and storing XMLTypes as CLOBs in the Database
Client: Healthcare
Project: Sql Server Cluster Installation & Migration
Tasks delivered: Analyzed existing IT infrastructure and databases. Submitted recommendations to client. Installed Windows Server 2003 Cluster. Installed Sql Server 2005 Cluster, SAC, Reporting Services. Migrated databases from Sql Server 2000 to Sql Server 2005. Modified VB & Access front ends to use the new cluster. QA & Testing of the Applications and Cluster.
Project: Oracle Database Administration
Environment: Oracle 9i, 10g, MS-SQL Server, Toad, Oracle Enterprise Manager, RMAN, RAC, ASM, DataGuard, HP-UX 11.11.
- System Administration / Networking Projects:
Client: Healthcare facility
Project: Network Administration for the IT facility
Tasks delivered: Provide support for Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 servers, LAN, WAN and helpdesk. Provide support for Astaro Firewall, SQL, IIS, Email, A Variety of Clinical Applications, and Terminal Server. Create company policies, phone systems, computer deployment and end user support. Manage users and policies in Active Directory. Manage computers in Active Directory. Implemented upgrade of Keane Software. Implemented new server installations. Provided helpdesk support to end users and acted as a technical liaison to VP/Directors. Trained end users on hardware and software. Provided IT strategies and goals
Tasks handled :
- Migrating and upgrading from Microsoft Windows Server 2003 to Microsoft Windows Server 2008 with Active Directory including domain controller, file server, print server, users DNS, DHCP, Group Policies, Windows SUS Server, Print Server, Event Monitoring and Management, IIS, Firewall, Terminal Server, File Server, Scripting.
- Configuration and administration of VMware ESX Server 3.5 Virtual Center Consolidated Backup implementing Exchange Server 2007 and Sharepoint Server 2007 under Windows Server 2008 in virtualization server Infrastructure environment
- Implemented, supported and administered for Microsoft Window Server 2003, Exchange 2003 and upgraded to Windows Server 2008 Active Directory including domain controller, file server, print server and users, also administration of Windows XP & Vista desktop.
- Installing, configuring and testing network connectivity of workstations and group of users to VLANs through Cisco Catalyst 2600 Switch. Assigning interfaces on the same system to different VLANs. Enforcing differing security policies for the different workgroups
- Created and maintained documentation and inventory on Network Infrastructure, Hardware and Software and finding current IT infrastructure and defining upgrade requirements.
- Maintaining and verifying company backups including those on the Server as well as the network storage devices (NAS), Managing tape inventory and prepares tapes for off-site storage.
- Installing, maintaining and upgrading different healthcare software tools like KEAN, Centricity, Physician practices etc. databases on dedicated Dell Power Edge Server.
- Prioritizing, troubleshooting, and resolving system problems in order to provide a very reliable and highly available wireless computing environment for patient care in LAB, examination room and emergency services.
- Performing System Management functions such as Account administration, performance tuning, software installation and configuration, firmware updates, backing up and restoring data, debugging software, and improving system and service monitoring, capacity planning, and disaster recovery.
- Web development Projects:
Tasks delivered:Define and document business requirements, business process flows and diagrams.Research and prioritize user requirements and functional requirements. Document and revise functional requirements and specifications.Create use cases using standard modeling formats (such as UML). Provide review and input into other deliverables as appropriate (e.g. page schematics or interaction designs).Map functionality to system components and develop system test plans and test scripts.Facilitate stakeholder interviews to gather business/functional requirements.Be the liaison between the business units, technology teams and support teams.Business cases defining the costs and benefits associated with requested changes.User Acceptance test plans
- Software Configuration / QA Projects:
Contact us at 1 800 656 0850 for details.