VSC-INC: Consulting and Custom-made Software Development

We have analyzed and compared huge product databases searching for overlap and specific differences, especially from competition point of view or for cleaning up product assortments.

We have analyzed the long term development of purchase prices and we have discovered how suppliers are trying to pass along higher prices of the commodity market, but not letting our client benefit from price falls.

We have discovered lacks in the internal price maintenance leading to higher purchase costs.

We have analyzed how product mix and different price components (gross price, promotions, discounts, quantity brackets) influence the gross margin. This enabled our client to discover in business processes weak points, that have ultimately led to decreasing profit.

We have shown new opportunities in price management: how to scale product prices based on quantified technical attributes (size, weight, kW, diameter, etc.) resulting in higher margins.

The starting point is always an excellent database design, one of our major strengths.

We offer solutions both for simple and quick reporting and for creating a huge high-performance enterprise data warehouse.

Our own easy to use BI system enables the user to generate reports already after a short introduction, practically without any training.

On the high end we can design and develop an enterprise data warehouse for a multinational corporation covering all business lines and branches in many countries. We are able to integrate with all leading BI tools available on the market.

Our daily work is to provide high performance BI systems for companies striving for data driven business.

In the commercial field companies like to use simulation models when they know about influencing factors, but are not clear about their concrete impact. They want to try different constellations, analyze the results, change the input parameters and check immediately the effect.

We offer both a wide range of simulation models and the possibility to develop algorithms especially for your business. You will be provided with a clear presentation of the results and you can change the input parameters in real time. Due to our high performance in-memory database the new results will be presented within a second.

Our users are enthusiastic about the way of working and about the speed.

The majority of business processes contain product data. While dealing with big data sets and product catalogs it is a frequent problem to provide an easy-to-understand structure, though this might be essential for finding the products on the web.

Typical questions asked:

• How to create search engine friendly product names and descriptions?
• How to build reasonable product groups?
• Which attributes should be used for grouping products?
• How to avoid duplicates?
• How to maintain data quality while loading big data sets from external source?

Our system for Product Content Management provides an excellent overview of product information and helps to discover lacks in data quality.

An innovative method has been implemented in our Name Group Builder for automated grouping of products. The resulting product data set allows much higher hit rates if somebody searches them on the Internet.

You want to compare products from different assortments:

• Are they the same?
• To which degree are they similar?

We compare product names and descriptions, numbering systems, attributes, images and calculate a value about their similarity. You get an overview about similarity and differences.

Internet is for everybody and people expect easy-to-use applications. We do our very best to reach this goal.

Some business models however require complex programming and sophisticated functionality in the background.

Sometimes it is reasonable to combine popular out-of-the-box web solutions and shops with individual components.

Please see below the links to some of our productive systems:

• www.Reachbird.io
• www.Investory.io
• www.Freedompizza.com
• www.MachineBnB.com

We supply the remote management, monitoring and registration system of mobile network repeaters for a big mobile provider. During the course of the project, we studied control and measurement methods necessary for reliable operation of both channel and band selective cellular repeaters, and possibilities of automating these methods. The system has since been extended to handle new devices and UMTS and LTE repeaters as well. The goal is to detect and automatically correct network issues (hardware failures or configuration errors) before customers take notice or fill a problem report. Non-correctable issues are reported via e-mail and SNMP alerts to ensure rapid response. By using this system operational costs were reduced and customer experience was improved significantly.

We communicate directly with several components of the network infrastructure through various interfaces (MSC, BSC, OMC, EMS, HLR, Remedy, OVOW…).

Identity Management Systems (IDM) fully or partially automate business and IT processes related to user administration and life cycle management. IDM encompasses all business processes controlling the life cycle of digital identities and the supporting IT infrastructure.

We were contracted by Sun Microsystems to develop a custom access control and role evaluation module for a Sun IDM deployment project at a multinational insurance company, which determined the roles and access rights of each user in an auditable way according to complex business logic and continuously changing organizational structure.

Our client, a major telco provider handles millions of user accounts and subscribers in different systems through several online services. They introduced a uniform centralized authentication, authorization and single sign-on solution in 2010, which is being improved and optimized ever since. Our company played a significant role in the design and implementation of this highly available and scalable SSO solution and has been providing 2nd level support for the customer for years. During the project we had to cooperate with experts from the customer and several contractors to unify the existing isolated solutions.

Technologies: ForgeRock OpenSSO, OpenDJ, LDAP, ESB integration, web services.

Security and reliability of human resources is a significant risk in the world of transportation. Truck drivers as “strangers” are trusted with shipments possibly worth hundreds of thousands of euros to drive them from one site to another.

Mostly the drivers are responsible for losses incurred during delivery (theft, damages, accidents), but they can pick up another high value shipment from a different company the next day without any consequence.

We were contracted to develop the DIDb system to solve this problem by providing a central driver registration and supervision system trusted by the competing market participants (transportation companies) and used by them for sharing knowledge about drivers.

We designed a highly available multi-node system supporting the control of drivers across Europe 7×24. Drivers identify themselves using a MIFARE card and a PIN to the Java based thick client application deployed through Java Web Start.

Technologies: Solaris, PostgreSQL, Java EE, WS-Security, Hibernate, Swing, Java Web Start, Custom hardware integration (MIFARE card reader), Linux (complete customization).

We developed a photo printing kiosk for one of our partners. The device, installed at busy locations, can receive pictures from Android (Bluetooth) and iPhone (AirPrint) devices and prints them immediately using the built-in photo printer. The customer can pay for the pictures using coins handled by the coin acceptor module via a ccTalk interface.

The shipped components are tightly integrated with the Linux environment (Bluetooth, WiFi, raw USB communication, ccTalk) and are delivered as Debian packages (version and dependency handling, installation scripts).

Technologies: Linux, Java SE, JavaFX, CSS, custom hardware integration (coin acceptor, photo printer).