Deliver Actionable Analytics for a telecom company

CUSTOMER

The Customer is a Florida based telecom company participating in the State Disability Support Program and providing prepaid cell phones and service packages to disadvantaged and low-income individuals.

CHALLENGE

As a part of the project, SourceLogix team was to design and implement a data management and analytics platform to let the Customer collect the data from multiple sources and get insights into customer behavior. The Customer wanted the platform to analyze historical data and enable forecasting. Access rights were another issue to solve, as the Customer planned to provide their tenants with the access to the tenant-related analytics.

SOLUTION

The data analytics platform was gathering raw data (such as user’s impressions and click-throughs, tariff plans, device models, apps installed and more) from 10+ sources.

To collect this telemetry data and move it into Apache Kafka, SourceLogix big data team suggested the MQTT protocol.

The team also suggested using Amazon Spot Instances to reduce the costs of AWS computing resources. To ensure the analytical system’s scalability, they used AWS Application Load Balancers.

Apache Kafka acted as a data streaming platform. There, the raw data was organized for further offload into the landing zone that was running on Amazon Simple Storage Service. For data storage and warehousing, Amazon Redshift was chosen, where the telemetry data from mobile phones running on Android, as well as the information from the Enterprise Resource Planning and the Home Location Register (HLR) was supplied to.

To enable regular and ad-hoc reporting, SourceLogix developed ROLAP cubes with 30+ dimensions and 10+ facts. For instance, the analytical system measured advertising impressions and click-throughs of a particular user to calculate the reward points earned. Another example: based on the increased number of calls to the support, the Customer could expect that the user was likely to be dissatisfied with the service. With no measures taken, that could lead to customer churn.

Not only the Customer but also their tenants (also telecom companies with their own customers and HLRs) were granted access to the platform for valuable insights. For instance, a tenant can access the part of analytics related to their company. To make this possible, SourceLogix team introduced two approaches: shared access (organized at the data warehouse level) and dedicated access (involving a separate AWS account).

RESULTS

With SourceLogix big data services, the Customer was able to:

• Measure the engagement and identify the preferences of a particular user.
• Spot trends in the users’ behavior.
• Make predictions about how users would behave.
• Invoice advertisers based on their calculated share.
• Benefit from insightful data analytics (for example, daily earnings, number of new users, customer service data and more).

The use of Amazon Spot Instances allowed the Customer to reduce the costs of AWS computing resources by 80%.

TECHNOLOGIES AND TOOLS

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Develop NLP and Text-to-Speech mobile app for a large travel portal

CUSTOMER

The Customer is an American company that has been offering language learning solutions to users in over 175 countries since 2012. Their mission is to revolutionize the way people learn languages and assist travelers in everyday communication.

CHALLENGE

To stand out in the market of travel apps with their innovative linguistic vision, the Customer needed to create a travel-oriented language learning solution comprising a web portal and mobile apps for iOS and Android. The Customer expected the apps to provide a text-to-speech feature with native speakers’ pronunciation, implying the use of large amounts of media data. As for the web portal, the Customer didn’t have specific requirements, which posed a challenge on its own.

SOLUTION

SourceLogix developed a solution consisting of Android and iOS apps, which serve as interactive travel phrasebooks, and a learning web portal, where users can take their language skills further.

Mobile apps

SourceLogix design teams created native iOS and Android UIs, which later were turned into full-fledged apps by two dedicated mobile development teams.

The final apps offer translation into 8 languages and allow users to:

• Look for standard translated phrases in the app’s main topics (such as Hotel, Business, and Transport).
• Build custom phrases from separate words or phrase blocks in their mother tongue and immediately see each block translated in the target language.
• See phonetic hints on how to pronounce a full phrase correctly.
• Create a personal collection of phrases for future reference.

Just as the Customer requested, SourceLogix implemented the text-to-speech feature as well. Each word and phrase block in the app are linked to multiple audio files with native speakers’ pronunciation of the words in their own language. When a user wants to listen to a standard or a custom-built sentence in a particular language, the app assembles and plays the audios for all separate words in sequence.

To let the apps remain lightweight (~40MB each) yet give users convenient access to all necessary media files, including the immense number of audio files, the Cloudflare content delivery network (CDN) was set up.

The learning portal

The web portal goes further than the apps in terms of the learning content while staying true to the principle of prioritizing conversational skills. It also allows users to register and create personal learning spaces.

Due to the absence of solid requirements, many features of the web portal had to be defined and fine-tuned on the fly. Agile development methodology allowed for flexibility that helped SourceLogix web developers to successfully implement the portal.

The learning portal’s administration panel also allows the Customer to:

• Upload and edit video, audio, and graphic files.
• Arrange all media materials according to different topics and set up a custom sequence for their presentation.
• Create training and revision exercises to build learners’ competences.
• Design and update interactive tests for learners to assess their progress and highlight knowledge gaps.

Thanks to the responsive UI created by SourceLogix designers, the web portal conveys seamless user experience across all popular desktop and mobile browsers.

Since the web portal was supposed to run on a subscription-based model with a free trial, SourceLogix also integrated it with Stripe Billing engine, thus ensuring secure money transactions.

RESULTS

The apps received a number of prestigious awards in such categories as Best Education, Best Travel, and New Education Apps in Italy, Australia, New Zealand and Southeast Asia. Currently, both iOS and Android apps are listed as #1 Education App in App Store and Google Play of 10+ countries.
The Customer scheduled the official release of the web portal for a later date.

TECHNOLOGIES AND TOOLS

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Android:

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Revamp patient care coordination through web app

CUSTOMER

The Customer is a US leading health information exchange (HIE) vendor.

CHALLENGE

The Customer's business challenge was in limited HIE capabilities, unable to ensure streamlined cooperation between patients and their caregivers. The Customer decided to introduce a mobile care coordination application to evolve their HIE platform by putting patients in charge of their health data and allowing them to control the process of sharing it with their providers and close ones. Apart of that, the Customer wanted to equip the caregivers with a mobile tool to communicate with each other on the go in case of need.

SOLUTION

The app created by our healthcare app development team is designed to support the needs of both patients and care team members, including providers, relatives and close ones. Since one person can be both a patient and a care team member at the same time, we enabled an easy patient/caregiver account toggle through the password input or fingerprint validation.

Patient account

For patients, an app is divided into two main modules – health status and care team management.

Within the health status module, the patient can view their aggregated health information from one or many providers, including:

• Diagnoses
• Vitals (including height, weight, SpO2, temperature, respiration, etc.)
• Allergies
• Medications
• Immunizations
• Payers
• Documents (including medical images, CCDs, lab results, etc.)

Here, the patient can manage data visibility and allow or deny access to certain information (e.g. medications) to a particular care team member. Moreover, if any information requires update or change (e.g., new allergy), the patient can request this change from a provider within the app and, if needed, share the update with other providers.

In the care team management module, the patient can view their care team members and invite new ones. In case the patient wants to invite a provider, he or she can pick a health specialist from the list of available providers. Besides, an invitation to providers, family and friends can be sent via email or within the app, if a future member has installed it already. Moreover, the patient can contact their caregivers using one or more channels, such as calls, video chats and secure messaging.

Caregiver account

Caregivers can access various information about their patients, including the health data they choose to share and the information about other care team members within and outside the organization, if allowed by the patient. In case other care team members are visible to a caregiver, he or she can contact them via calls, video chats and secure messages.

They also have an access to events, occurred with patients, such as:

• ADT encounter
• ER visit
• Adverse reaction to medications
• Accident requiring treatment
• Change in behavior
• Signs of depression and more

Care team members can manage their event notification preferences to get data about the events they choose via a particular channel, e.g., push notifications, fax, email, text message or secure message. Caregivers can also create events within the app, if needed.

If a provider wants to become a care team member without an invitation, he or she can send a request through the app and fill in the form with the information about their education, board of certifications, specialties, hospital, in-network health plan and more. After this information is validated, the request is either approved or rejected by the HIE specialists. In case of approval, the provider gets into the list of available providers for patients to add.

RESULTS

SourceLogix delivered a mobile solution to create an interconnected circle for patients and their care team members. Now, patients are in charge of their health information, aggregated from different sources, platforms and organizations, with the ability to share it with chosen caregivers. They can pick the most convenient channel and reach out to care team members, gathered in one place.

changes, events, emerging conditions and more. They can contact patients and other care team members in case of need. With the mobility added to care coordination, providers can ensure timely intervention and proactive approach to any condition, be it a complex chronic disease or a post-surgery recovery.

TECHNOLOGIES AND TOOLS

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CRM Engagement component for Oil and Gas Client

CUSTOMER

The end Customer is a global provider of HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning), mechanical steel and structure, electrics, refrigeration, and maintenance services for offshore and marine installations like oil drilling platforms and deck cranes. Established in 2004, the Customer has since worked with such clients as ExxonMobil and Shell.

CHALLENGE

Due to the essence of the Customer’s business, online meetings are a crucial part of the workflow. Communicating with high-profile end clients on a day-to-day basis, the Customer wanted to ensure all the participants would receive timely and comprehensive follow-ups with no details missing.

Looking for a solution, the Customer chose to introduce an extra component to its CRM system that would automate most of the manual tasks and facilitate distribution of meeting minutes.

SOLUTION

SourceLogix team of Microsoft Dynamics CRM consultants was consulted to upgrade the default functionality of the Customer’s CRM system with an advanced redistributable component on top of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. The newly available features included a custom calendar, alerts, and automatic distribution of meeting follow-ups to the participants.

Additionally, the component can automatically export the participants’ profile data and insert them into custom forms that may be required in the course of the Customer’s interaction with end clients.

RESULTS

In line with the requirements, the new component was seamlessly integrated with the B2B CRM system to enable easy and time-efficient management of meeting minutes via a clear and intuitive user interface.

Now that it was also possible to draft and automatically distribute follow-ups in real-time to all the meeting participants thanks to MS CRM customization, no business-critical information could be lost in remote communication.

TECHNOLOGIES AND TOOLS

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Architect Trade Marketing and Planning solution for a very large FMCG.

CUSTOMER

The Customer is one of the world’s largest marketing agency networks with 100 offices in more than 80 countries and nearly 10,000 employees. Among the company’s clients there are McDonald’s, Samsung, Nintendo, P&G, the Coca-Cola Company, Fiat and many others.

CHALLENGE

One of the company’s clients is a leading international FMCG corporation with 82,000 employees and products sold in over 180 markets. To boost its worldwide sales, the client needed complex trade promotion management software that would serve as a trade marketing planning system and could be customized to operate in a particular market (world region or country). SourceLogix was chosen to take over the development process and coordinate the third-party teams working at the project.

SOLUTION

Within a week after the request, SourceLogix team of consultants, including 1 certified Scrum Master and 2 business analysts, visited the Customer’s headquarters for a short training before the start of the project. In the course of the following month, the custom software development team was ramped up with 10 experienced .NET developers, who went on to develop two interconnected applications:

• Field planning tool: an intuitive application to help the regional headquarters create trade marketing plans while achieving almost real-time visibility of the progress. A plan contains a set of tasks to be performed by the territory executives to improve revenue for a certain geographical area (for example, a city or a group of states). The HQ can allocate budgets and resources for particular activities.
• Market integrated platform: makes performing marketing activities easier for the territory executives. Armed with iPads and following a sequence of well-defined tasks, they can schedule visits to the target outlets and initiate brand promotion. A separate app was developed for each activity. The apps are integrated with the system back-end, which allows the HQ to monitor performance.

SourceLogix was efficiently implementing agile practices to coordinate 3 international development groups. Particularly, the team was responsible for the full cycle of the development process from requirements analysis and planning through implementation to support.

RESULTS

The end customer received a handy automation software and now it is applied in more than 60 countries. Increasing the alignment between the regional planning and territorial execution, the company has been able to improve efficiency in many spheres from national portfolio and channel strategies down to the execution level.

TECHNOLOGIES AND TOOLS

Back-end:

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Continuous integration:

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Big data channel analysis inside a leading Market Research firm.

CUSTOMER

The Customer is a leading market research company.

CHALLENGE

Though having a robust analytical system, the Customer believed that it would not be able to satisfy the company’s future needs. Acknowledging this situation, the Customer was keeping their eyes open for a future-focused innovative solution. A system-to-be was to cope with the continuously growing amount of data, to analyze big data faster and enable comprehensive advertising channel analysis.

After deciding on the system’s-to-be architecture, the Customer was searching for a highly qualified and experienced team to implement the project. Satisfied with a long-lasting cooperation with SourceLogix, the Customer addressed our consultants to do the entire migration from the old analytical system to a new one.

SOLUTION

During the project, the Customer’s business intelligence architects were cooperating closely with SourceLogix big data team. The former designed an idea, and the latter was responsible for its implementation.

For the new analytical system, the Customer’s architects selected the following frameworks:

• Apache Hadoop – for data storage;
• Apache Hive – for data aggregation, query and analysis;
• Apache Spark – for data processing.

Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure were selected as cloud computing platforms.

Upon the Customer’s request, during the migration, the old system and the new one were operating in parallel.

Overall, the solution included five main modules:

• Data preparation
• Staging
• Data warehouse 1
• Data warehouse 2
• Desktop application

Data preparation

The system has been supplied with raw data taken from multiple sources, such as TV views, mobile devices browsing history, website visits data and surveys. To enable the system to process more than 1,000 different types of raw data (archives, XLS, TXT, etc.), data preparation included the following stages coded in Python:

• Data transformation
• Data parsing
• Data merging
• Data loading into the system.

Staging

Apache Hive formed the core of that module. At that stage, data structure was similar to raw data structure and had no established connections between respondents from different sources, for example, TV and internet.

Data warehouse 1

Similar to the previous block, that one also based on Apache Hive. There, data mapping took place. For example, the system processed the respondents’ data for radio, TV, internet and newspaper sources and linked users’ ID from different data sources according to the mapping rules. ETL for that block was written in Python.

Data warehouse 2

With Apache Hive and Spark as a core, the block guaranteed data processing on the fly according to the business logic: it calculated sums, averages, probabilities, etc. Spark’s DataFrames were used to process SQL queries from the desktop app. ETL was coded in Scala. Besides, Spark allowed filtering query results according to access rights granted to the system’s users.

Desktop application

The new system enabled a cross analysis of almost 30,000 attributes and built intersection matrices allowing multi-angled data analytics for different markets. In addition to standard reports, such as Reach Pattern, Reach Ranking, Time Spent, Share of Time, etc., the Customer was able to create ad hoc reports. After the Customer selected several parameters of interest (for example, a particular TV channel, group of customers, time of day), the system returned a quick reply in the form of easy-to-understand charts. The Customer could also benefit from forecasting. For example, based on expected reach and planned advertising budget, the system would forecast the revenue.

RESULTS

At the project closing stage, the new system was able to process several queries up to 100 times faster than the outdated solution. With the valuable insights that the analysis of almost 30,000 attributes brought, the Customer was able to carry out comprehensive advertising channel analysis for different markets.

TECHNOLOGIES AND TOOLS

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CRM implementation for a multi-business conglomerate.

CUSTOMER

The Customer is a US-based group of companies present in the variety of industries including luxury retail, hospitality, and ecommerce. An utmost experience and a tailor-made approach to clients are the cornerstones of the Customer’s business philosophy.

CHALLENGE

The Customer approached SourceLogix for a comprehensive solution encompassing efficient customer and operations management.

The Customer used to rely solely on the professionalism and communicative skills of their team to maintain excellent customer service at each company separately. However, they matured to enter the next level of a highly personalized approach to clients within their whole ecosystem. This called for a unified client base that gives access to all-embracing client information. As companies managed by the Customer exist separately, the main challenge has been to centralize real-time data flows.

As a part of a targeted top-of-the-line client service, the Customer needed a loyalty program to award clients by purchase volume and frequency.

Along with improving the quality of client communication, the Customer sought to automate some daily activities. For example, they needed a smart solution for case management to avoid the risk of overlooking client issues due to human error.

Also, the Customer needed a handy tool for efficient operations management to gain greater visibility into daily operations.

SOLUTION

To meet all the business needs, SourceLogix proposed Microsoft Dynamics CRM implementation. The project team focused on two key tasks – to customize the platform in line with all the Customer’s requirements and solve the challenge of centralizing data from multiple sources.

Striving to make the customer service personalized for clients, convenient for the staff, and transparent for managers, SourceLogix came up with the following functionality:

• A comprehensive CRM profile houses available client information delivered by enterprise systems (like contact details, wish lists, orders) and entered by the Customer’s team members (like client’s character traits, behavioral characteristics, personal style).
• Automated case management is achieved by creating customer service teams in the CRM and adding assignment and escalation rules for case flows.
• SourceLogix created experience surveys sent to clients automatically after their interaction with companies. To let the Customer get direct feedback on their service while remaining non-intrusive for clients, SourceLogix provided for a convenient way of conducting surveys by email and the possibility for the staff to turn off surveys in a CRM profile.
• A two-step loyalty program was implemented to maintain an appropriate level of exclusivity for luxury retail. The CRM system automatically assigns scoring levels based on the predefined criteria, then sales teams check the levels in clients’ profiles and reward them accordingly.
• Referrals serve as an internal communication channel for the Customer’s businesses. When needed, they inform one another about clients’ needs and interests, book services and ensure that clients are welcomed as long-awaited guests.

Operations management benefits from CRM implementation due to the following functionality:

• A set of calendars (business facility, personal, working hours and business).
• Goal setting and management functionality.
• Personal dashboards for sales activity monitoring.
• Facility management for storing comprehensive information about the infrastructure.

To enable data centralization from multiple sources into one CRM system, SourceLogix offered to implement a data warehouse (DWH). There, the data gets integrated, cleaned, and unified to be further transferred to the CRM.

There are two scenarios of how different data types get to the DWH:

• The data from a customer profile (full name, gender, contact details, etc.) arrives immediately in the DWH. Some third-party systems deliver the data using the push method. With others, the DWH pulls the data at a predefined schedule.
• Meanwhile, there are separate staging databases for electronic systems of each company that collect raw transactional data on an hourly basis. After the data gets unified and deduplicated in staging databases, it is exported to the DWH.

SourceLogix has also created OLAP cubes to provide the Customer with advanced analytics capabilities. Once a day, the data gets exported from the DWH for further analysis. The Customer gets it visualized in dashboards, pre-defined and ad-hoc reports.

RESULTS

With the CRM, the Customer brings their companies under one umbrella. Having their client data centralized and daily processes automated, the Customer upgrades client service within their whole business to a new quality level – team members serve repeat clients and cross-sell more effectively while the risk of human negligence regarding client service is minimized. The Customer builds trust with clients and contributes to their loyalty with bonuses. Business managers get real-time analytics concerning customer management activities and are always up-to-date with current cases, goals, and scheduled activities of their team.

TECHNOLOGIES AND TOOLS

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