Highlights
- Retrieving Mission-Critical Business Data: developed a solution to retrieve data from diverse financial reports and annotate it.
- Overhauling Faulty Software Architecture: redesigned an MVP developed by another vendor and built a custom software solution to match the needs of a business.
- Redesigning and Expanding the Data Annotation Functionality: implemented complex business logic that consists of around 150 business rules.
Client
Our client is one of the premier U.S. asset management companies that employs more than 12,000 people, operates in 32 countries, and manages an investment portfolio in excess of $200 billion. In 2018, the company’s revenue exceeded $1 billion.
Satisfied with the results of a recent Web crawler development project we’d implemented for the client, their high-ranking technical officers approached us for assistance in developing a data collection application. The project was started by another provider of bespoke software that failed to comply with the client’s expectations and delivered an underperforming app with only basic functionality.
Although the client had several thousand in-house and 3d-party software engineers involved in their different projects, they entrusted the development of their important Data Collection tool to SPD Technology because of our high quality and development speed.
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Team Size: Product
A data collection application that allows retrieving data from one of the world’s premier IPO databases, annotating this data, and streaming it via a 3d-party financial application. The data that can be retrieved includes around 70 various data points.
The user can access and open a file in the IPO database, highlight the required data point, and indicate the destination to which it must be mapped. The application automatically makes the mapped data available in a partner’s application, highlighting the annotated data point and providing easy navigation to the corresponding data source. Thus, users of the client’s partner’s financial application can easily get familiar with the source any of the annotated data originates from.
To validate the manually annotated data, the application utilizes around 150 business rules. It pinpoints any possible errors and enables the user to fix an error with a single click. For instance, the system can raise a flag if the profit margin exceeds revenue.
Key components of the product include a data annotation module, a data collection module, and a data validation module.
Goals and objectives
- Automation of the Solution: Find a way to automate the process of collecting data from financial reports.
- Data Integration into the App: Make the collected data available through a financial application of one of the client’s partners.
Project challenge
- Poor Software Architecture of the Existing Solution:
Low performance and frequent data losses of the MVP version of the client’s app that was developed by their first software provider was severely bug-ridden. - Changes in the System’s Graphical User Interface:
Implement the system’s GUI as an Excel-like table, as per the client’s requirement. This created additional difficulties in developing this functionality. The annotation capability of the system was difficult to make function properly because of the multiple faults in the software architecture of the application. - Tight Deadlines:
Deliver a significant part of the functionality against a very tight deadline, which was necessary due to business demands.
Solution
SPD Technology’s project team made an audit of the client’s application and redesigned part of its software architecture. This allowed us to rule out 90% of the possible data losses and significantly sped up the system’s performance. It also became much easier to deal with the small number of data losses that still might occur as the system began to automatically detect and highlight errors.
We redesigned and dramatically expanded the data annotation functionality of the application and developed from scratch its advanced data validation capability.
Our developers put in additional effort to meet the deadline and implement the system GUI in full sync with the client’s requirements.
Tech Stack
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AWS -
Terraform -
Docker
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Java -
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Spring Boot -
Hibernate -
Vue.js -
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Express.js -
jQuery -
Web Socket
Our results
We have delivered a powerful tool that fully automates one of the client’s mission-critical business processes.
- 10x Improvement of the Processing Power and Stability: developed a solution that offers dramatic improvement of the system’s performance and reliability, compared to existing MVP.
- Unlocking a New Business Line for the Client: helped to achieve an important business objective – start providing IPO data on behalf of one of the world’s premier providers of investment data, research, and technology.
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