Insidus Corporation

CA

We build powerful software solutions based on your specific needs, so platforms will vary across organizations and specific business challenges. For small business solutions, we create software using the Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) shared development environment. Larger and more complex solutions most likely will require a client/server solution or a web-based solution so that the software is easily scalable along with your business.

Client/Server platforms have emerged as the most appropriate platforms in the business world. The similarities between this computing paradigm and the way businesses want to operate mesh so well that an overwhelming number of organizations are migrating to client-server platforms. The following traits set client-server computing apart from other platforms:

There is a division of labor. Client-server systems divide up the work of computing among many separate machines

Client-server systems rely on networks to connect disparate computers into a cohesive whole, and almost all organizations have a network

The emphasis on the end-user

Depending on the project requirements, our software solutions can utilize the full power of your organizations application software through a single user interface. The graphic user interface environment allows users to seamlessly control one or numerous software applications and access data from various databases, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Business Intelligence (BI) systems (Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP, AS/400, JD Edwards, Baan, Smartstream, Peachtree, FoxPro, Exchange, Lotus, Bloomberg, Reuters, etc.).

Below is a list of platforms that we regularly develop software solutions with. The list is certainly not exhaustive, so please contact us if you have questions about platforms not listed below:

Operating Systems

Microsoft Windows

Linux

Macintosh

Unix

Databases

Access

MySQL

Oracle

SQL Server

MSDE

Sybase

dBase

Paradox

Focus

Other database platforms

Languages/Front-End

ASP

ASP. NET

AS/400

C#

C++/C

Carbon

Cocoa

Cold Fusion

Delphi

FoxPro

Java

Javascript

JSP

Perl

Python

PHP

XML/XSL

Visual Basic (VB)

Visual Basic for Applications (VBA)

Visual Basic. NET (VB. NET)

Others

Web

Site Design

Flash

Search Engine Optimization

Web Services

Other

The Problem

The Real Estate Auditor was created for a Fortune 100 company which held significant investments in thousands of real estate assets throughout the world. Even though real estate was not the companys main line of business, every investment required an audit and valuation to be performed by third party auditors (KPMG, Deloitte & Touche, PwC, etc.) twice a year.

Each auditor utilized their own models and methodologies to audit and value the various properties resulting in:

extremely high cycle times at a significant cost to the client

low data integrity, accuracy and consistency

the absence of consolidated analyses

Most methodologies used did not meet the rules set forth by the client and there were no opportunities to consolidate information or perform any apples to apples analyses.

The Solution

We created an all-inclusive automated software application that incorporated all of the rules and thresholds set out by the client. The flexible application allowed administrators to alter rules and thresholds within the system as required. The application was used by the third party auditors in the field to gather information and perform analyses and our client used the application to consolidate, track and analyze all of the information on the various properties.

Results and Benefits

The application forced the auditors to use a standardized methodology which eliminated massive amounts of duplication and allowed for consolidation of information on the spot. The time and cost savings were enormous. The average time required to audit and value an asset dropped from over 5 hours to roughly one hour and the cost per audit dropped from over $1000 per asset to $200 per asset. The auditors were no longer struggling to meet time deadlines and the client is now able to perform analyses across all assets with confidence. Even though the immediately visible and measurable benefit of the tool to the client is several million dollars per year in value, there is greater value derived from the analyses that the tool provide to the organization on an ongoing basis. The client can now perform important year-over-year analyses using standardized data fields and base their decisions on high-integrity data. It is difficult to measure the exact amount of value that the organization derives from making a confident decision as a result of the software, but from what our client tells us, this value is much higher than the visible dollar value associated with the cost and time savings. The cost to build the application software was a mere fraction of the value that it brought to the organization, so the return on investment (ROI) was astronomical.

The Problem

The Commission Payout System was developed for the investment banking arm of a large global financial institution. The investment banking arm had grown with the acquisition and amalgamation of a number of small boutique investment banks and retail investment firms. The entire entity operated with a number of disparate platforms as each acquired entity operated on a different legacy platform. These disparate systems had an enormous impact on the way investment advisors (IAs) on the retail side of the business were being paid.

The entire process to pay investment advisors involved 22 individuals from nine departments. No department or individual wanted to take ownership of the deficient process. On a daily basis IAs were calling the accounting department, management, operations or human resources to complain about missing trades, repeat trades, being underpaid, commission schedule problems or other payout issues. Four separate platforms were used to collect trade data and a 3rd party data processor was used to calculate commissions on a daily basis. Management found the 3rd party vendor to be very inflexible. The vendor would not supply the investment bank with daily soft copy versions of processed data, so the investment bank had a full-time assistant stand at a fax machine and fax all hard-copy commission reports to the various branches. The vendor, who was being paid $175, 000 a year for the processing services, was not able to incorporate a complex set of rules that management required into the processor as part of a new compensation scheme.

The Solution

The Commission Payout System was created to automate the entire process of calculating commissions and paying out investment advisors. The previous days trades were taken from the data warehouse and uploaded into the system. On a daily basis, the processor within the system calculated all commissions subject to all complex compensation scheme rules and thresholds and then created a series of commission reports by branch and by investment advisor. These reports were automatically saved to a network location and emailed to the investment advisors and branch managers. On a monthly basis, the commissions were consolidated and payroll was prepared by the system and mid-month advances were determined for all (IAs) and their sales assistants working in all branches nationally. The entire system was operated by one individual in the accounting department.

Results and Benefits

The investment bank was able to reduce a large number of full-time equivalent headcount and sever ties with the 3rd party data processor. The cost savings of automating the entire process adds several hundreds of thousands of dollars of value to the organization each year, and the software application had a payback period of less than six months and a high return on investment (ROI). Cost and time savings as well as other benefits came in many forms as follows:

Eliminated need for expensive and rigid third party data processing

Time savings were so massive that six full time equivalent headcount were eliminated

Retired two unreliable legacy database systems

Increased quality of work life for employees involved in the process

Eliminated overtime costs

Dramatically increased data accuracy and integrity

Decreased employee turnover

Decreased training costs

Improved employee morale and motivation

Decreased confrontations between departments

Increased productivity

Elimination or errors

Automated daily reporting and payroll services

The Problem

The Market Manager client is a large global consumer goods organization whose management lacked accurate and timely product and customer information for the sales and marketing side of their business.

When the organization launches new products into the market, they launch a group of products in a bundle at once. Leading up to the launch date are a number of promotional and advertising campaigns to introduce the new products. These marketing campaigns are quite expensive and management was discovering that many times, consumers would be very exited about a new product, but could not find it on store shelves after being exposed to the advertising. The timing of the advertising did not always correspond to distributor acceptance of the new products. The company did not have a system to track how many of their customers had committed to listing and more importantly, how many have ordered a new product. The result many times was wasted advertising dollars. Management also had no way of tracking the success of new products in the marketplace or comparing products with comparable products from competitors.

The client required a system that tracked voids and associated dollar amounts with their customers. A void, or opportunity, is where a product could be on a customer shelf, but is not currently. The organization also required a way to track and analyze product distribution levels in the marketplace.

The Solution

The Market Manager software allows the organization to track the status of each product with each customer. Users can run price margin analysis across customers and generate numerous reports that show which customers are not listing, or which customers have priced a product above or below threshold prices. Warning flags alert users if customers dont list selected products or if benchmark dates have passed. Reports can be generated in English or French. For product distribution, the software runs a number of different analyses in both numeric and graphical form. The software also tracks all aspects of product launch bundles. Included are a couple of digital dashboards and a method of uploading product distribution consumer data. The organization now has a clear and granular picture of their products in the marketplace. The Market Manager is designed to be very intuitive and gives management valuable information with which to make decisions.

Results and Benefits

The largest benefit that the Market Manager provides is to management in the form of rich analysis with which to base their decisions upon. Management now knows the status of their products in the marketplace so they can maximize the impact of millions of advertising dollars that they spend on various forms of media. They can also track the popularity of products across many metrics such as by geographic region or by customer so that strategic product decisions can be made. The software allows the sales department and the marketing department to share data where necessary.

It is difficult to calculate an exact dollar amount of value that the application brings to the organization, but by allowing management to make confident multi-million dollar decisions, we can confidently say that the benefits far outweigh the cost of developing the software. The Problem

The Activity Manager is a software application that was developed for a large global consumer goods organization to track and analyze the advertising and marketing efforts for hundreds of products. The main drivers for the creation of the software were to most effectively utilize advertising dollars across the organization, to track actual costs incurred against budgets and to allow management to make informed decisions regarding the timing of advertising and marketing efforts.

The client organization needed a way to track aggregated future advertising budgets by week across the entire organization. Since each brand had their own advertising budget and agenda that could change daily, it was impossible to know how much money the organization as a whole was spending during any given week. The organization also wanted a way to track advertising dollars spent per product line to be able to measure and analyze the effectiveness of different forms of advertising.

The Solution

The Activity Manager application was integrated with the Market Manager application to allow for the sharing of necessary information across the sales and the marketing departments. The software allows each brand manager to enter upcoming advertising blocks, by product, along a 24-month calendar timeline. Supporting ad data is entered as well so that any user can easily select a product from a list and instantaneously view two years worth of advertising and promotions projections. Users can click on any date on a two year timeline to drill down to underlying cost, sales and unit figures along with any comments if they exist. The Marketing Manager supplies current status data to users and the Activity Manager is a forecasting and budgeting tool.

Results and Benefits

The various types of analysis that can be extracted from the Activity Manager are meant to provide insightful information so that advertising dollars make the most impact at the right time. The application saved many man-hours of labour that was spent manually trying to track and forecast advertisements, promotions, in-store displays and media creation. Employees are now more efficient and productive with their time and the budgeting aspect assures that management is alerted at a very early stage so that there are no big surprises at year end. The time savings to employees is quite large, and it goes without saying that they are very happy to not have to perform manual tracking tasks on a regular basis.

Management can base their decisions on accurate information and analyses and the application successfully tied together the activities of the various brand groups. An exact dollar amount is difficult to calculate because many of the benefits are intangible, but when management bases major spending decisions on the analysis provided by the Activity Manager, it can be said that the tool adds a lot of value to the organization.

The Problem

The Project Authorization Request (PAR) Wizard is a workflow process software application that was developed for a large global financial institution to address a costly process workflow issue. To gain project approval within the organization, project owners must complete project request forms and circulate for appropriate signatures. Which signatures are required depends on predetermined funding threshold amounts, so a small project that does not require a lot of funding might only require signatures from one senior vice president and the project management office, where a large project with high funding requirements might require signatures from five or six levels of management, right up to the CEO. The project request form includes all necessary information surrounding the proposed project so that signatories do not have to needlessly waste time trying to find out details about the request.

The problem that our client was experiencing was that the process to complete a project authorization request form had grown to be so intricate and complex that very few project owners could even fill out a form correctly. Codes, acronyms and internal classifications were numerous and constantly changing. There were many internal transit codes that needed to be associated with cost types, but it was quite difficult trying to determine the correct code. The list of possible signatories at all management levels was constantly changing as well. A user would have to be highly versed in properly filling out a request form to correctly fill out the form in the first iteration. Most request forms were rejected at the project management office because they were prepared incorrectly. The numerous iterations back and forth between the project owner and the project management office greatly lengthened the time required to approve a project. This administrative bottleneck severely delayed internal projects, which resulted in frustration by everyone involved in the process. The cost implications were different for each project request and difficult to quantify accurately, but each delayed project carried its own opportunity cost.

The Solution

The PAR Wizard software allows the project owners to correctly fill out a project authorization request form every time. A system administrator updates the software as required so that users always have current information. A 20-step wizard guides the user through a complex maze of choices by allowing only legitimate choices. When a user makes a selection on one screen of the wizard, that selection determines what the user sees on the following screen, so users can only select legitimate choices each time. The Wizard guides the user to create a perfect form each time.

Users can review and alter their choices if necessary before printing. The printed form is automatically expanded or collapsed to include only the information that the user filled in and users can print preview their form to see exactly how it will look when printed. If the request is only partially complete, users can save the request to their hard drive and return later to upload, complete and print it.

Results and Benefits

The software completely restructured how the organization approved project requests, greatly reducing project approval turnaround time. Not only were the project owners happy to not have to waste their time in correcting numerous iterations of a request form, but the project management office was also thrilled to not have to review numerous iterations of the same form. It is difficult to measure an exact dollar amount of value that the software application provides the organization each year because much of the value is realized in the form of greatly reduced opportunity costs associated with delayed projects. The other large cost saving is associated with the man hours saved in streamlining the entire process. The employees involved in the process have an increased quality of work life and the training costs both in terms of dollars and time has been greatly reduced.

The Problem

The Executive Dashboard was developed for a large global financial institution as a tool to monitor performance against stated objectives. The organization uses a balanced scorecard approach to evaluate performance at every level of the organization, from the group level to the regional level to the country level, to the line of business level, to the product line level, to the department level and right down to the individual employee level. With a balanced scorecard approach, objectives, or key performance indicators (KPIs), are defined and agreed upon at the beginning of each year.

These KPIs must be monitored throughout the year. Most are updated on a monthly basis. By continuously monitoring KPIs, management and employees can take action early on when performance falls below benchmark thresholds. The challenge that the organization faced was continuously collecting data on KPIs and comparing them to stated benchmarks. Quantitative data is easy to collect and measure, but many KPIs are not quantitative measures, or they are measures that must be converted into quantitative data for balanced scorecard purposes. An example might be measuring an employees contribution toward recruiting and hiring. Other measures are quantitative in nature, but there is no easy way to track them. The organization saw the balanced scorecard fail in many areas because there was no system in place to capture current status data. All current data was collected manually and then consolidated for benchmark comparison. The manually collection and comparison was so time consuming that many KPIs were never updated at monthly intervals. Instead, management scrambled to collect the necessary data before year end. At that point, it was too late to address KPIs that were well below benchmark.

The Solution

The Executive Dashboard was designed to alert managers when performance measures were due and an easy and intuitive collection interface made the entry quick and painless. The software was designed to be highly intuitive so that even the most computer-challenged executive could use it without much training. Like the dashboard lights on a car, the Executive Dashboard alerts the users when there is a problem forming. With the Executive Dashboard, management is alerted immediately when KPIs fall below benchmark levels so objective can be addressed before its too late.

Results and Benefits

The software tool facilitated the balanced scorecard approach to management. Since the data collection was entirely digitized, management and users were alerted immediately when updates were not performed on time. Management was able to have a state of the union snapshot of the organization at any time across regions, departments, individuals and product lines. Warning signs allowed management to concentrate their efforts on those areas where there were red flags. Departments and individuals could monitor their performance against stated objectives.

The tool became an interactive measuring stick that allowed the financial institution to identify problem areas within their products or their operations and adjust accordingly. Users saved massive amounts of time that was previously spent collecting data on an on-going basis and management was able to base their decisions upon accurate and timely information. It is difficult to measure an exact dollar amount of value that the software application provides the organization each year because much of the value is realized in the form of greatly reduced opportunity costs, management decisions based on good information and freed up time for employees. For this particular organization that has over 60, 000 employees worldwide, the aggregate value of the tool makes the return on investment (ROI) very high even if it cannot be accurately measured.

The Problem

The Client Reference System was developed for a medium-sized office furniture manufacturer and solution provider to track their customers, solutions and job sites.

Even though the company was growing and penetrating many North American markets, they only had a handful of showroom facilities where they could showcase their products and designs. This made it difficult to impress potential clients outside a handful of major centers where they had showrooms. For major clients, the company would fly decision-makers to their head office facility, which was set up as a showroom facility. For mid-market clients, the company decided to use existing client facilities (with permission, of course) as showrooms to showcase their office solutions and high-end furniture. Most clients who were satisfied with the relationship were happy to oblige.

The theory seemed like a great low-cost strategy for business development, but when it was put into practice, there were a number of hurdles that needed to be overcome. No database existed to capture information about every job performed, so if the organization had a potential Chicago-based customer that was interested in product line X, it would become a hit or miss proposition that an existing customer in the immediate geographic area could be found. Usually, the relationship manager interested in locating an existing client site would have to start calling numerous people within the organization to track down the information, if it even existed. Sometimes through anecdotal information, an existing client in the area was located, but this information became increasingly difficult to find as employee turnover increased within the organization. Occasionally, someone at the head office was able to find the information, but when the existing client was called, the relationship manager received an angry reception because the client had a prior negative experience. Relationship managers were left scrambling to find the desired information by any means necessary.

The Solution

The Client Reference System was created so that information pertaining to each job for each customer across the entire organization could be referenced instantaneously. For example, the relationship manager could use the Client Reference System to identify all customers in the Chicago area, or all of Illinois. They could also identify which customers in the area purchased from product line X and they could also read comments relating to the job itself to see if the customer was happy with the work and products. Customer contact details are also provided so that the relationship manager in Chicago could quickly start calling customers to see if their facilities could be used to showcase the companys work and products. The software allowed the organization to pursue a low-cost strategy of showcasing their product lines across North America.

Results and Benefit

The main benefit was that the software tool facilitated their strategy of showcasing their products to potential customers at existing customer locations. This gave the company a powerful business development tool at almost no cost to the organization. The cost to set up and keep fresh numerous new showcase facilities throughout North America would have cost several million dollars. This case is an example of technology facilitating and supporting a business strategy. The relationship managers saved a lot of time and the cost of telephone calls trying to track down information within their organization. The major cost saving came in the form of reduced opportunity costs associated with not being able to showcase products in all markets.

541510, 511210

United Kingdom, United States