Complex Implementations

Project Challenge:

A large medical device company needed a new, complex Global Complaint Management System (GCMS), and several other vendors had failed to complete the implementation

Problem #1:

The project consisted of 17 record types, 13 web services, 71 Crystal reports, 3 regulatory reporting utilities with third party integration, and multiple Coordinator and Import services. The system needed to handle several million new records per year, which meant that any mistake in design or malfunction in functionality could have major business and compliance repercussions

Solution #1:

Web services were developed to facilitate integration with other systems, record creation and routing, lookup searches, and a 20-question OWS-based decision tree. Lookup services pulled in data from other systems. Record creation and routing was driven by multiple criteria, including (among other things) Complaint origin locale, field values, record states, and existence of other related records meeting certain conditions. With the large number of services, concurrency considerations were an especially important aspect of design, as multiple services often worked on the same records.

Problem #2:

As the GCMS contained over 1,700 fields, building reports using conventional techniques would have been a nightmare.

Solution #2:

Our team developed a solution to auto-generate large parts of Crystal single-record reports. Most of the developers’ focus could then be placed on business logic and formatting, saving a huge chunk of time and ensuring that there were minimal mistakes due to human error.

Our configuration report auto-generation software was leveraged to quickly build accurate design artifacts, which could be refreshed as needed when configuration changes were implemented.