Reporting transformation with data science and AI

Banking

Data science and AI transform disclosure and reporting

A multinational bank leveraged data automation to achieve major gains in reporting efficiency, with 99% accuracy in processing variable inputs, for its global investment fund.

Client

One of the world's leading bank

Goal

Improve efficiency in disclosure and reporting

Tools and technologies

Python – SciPy, Pytesseract, NumPy, Statistics

BUSINESS CHALLENGE

The client relies upon a centralized operations team to produce monthly NAV (Net Asset Value) and other financial reports for its international hedge funds— from data contained in 2,300 separate monthly investment fund performance reports. With batch receipts of rarely consistent file formats – PDF, Excel, emails, and images— the process to read each report, capture key info, and, create and distribute new metrics using the bank’s traditional tools and systems was highly manual, time-consuming, error-prone, and costly.

SOLUTION

Iris developed a Data Science solution that rapidly and accurately extracts tabular data from thousands of variable file documents. Using a statistical, AI-based algorithm featuring unsupervised learning, it auto-detects, construes, and resolves issues for every data point, configuration, and value. Complex inputs are calculated, consolidated, and mapped as per predefined templates and downstream business needs, efficiently generating numerous, distinct, and required period-end financial disclosures.

OUTCOMES

The high solution accuracy helped the client’s global NAV reporting team significantly improve precision, efficiency, quality, turnaround time, and flexibility. The delivered solution contributed to:

90 - 95% reduction in operational efforts
99% accuracy in processing variable inputs
Zero rework effort and cost

Our highly customizable and scalable solution can be seamlessly integrated with existing reporting applications and MS Outlook while accommodating additional volumes, report types, and business units.

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Powering shop floor efficiency with data analytics

Manufacturing

Powering efficiency on the shop floor

An Iris innovation helped a diesel engine manufacturer eliminate production bottlenecks.

Client

A leading diesel engine manufacturer

Goal

Reduce bottlenecks on the production line that arise from last-minute changes to orders and ensure compliance with build instructions

Tools and technologies

Windows, SQL Server, C#, .NET, ESB, HTML5, Angular, GitHub, JIRA, Visual Studio, and WebStrom

BUSINESS CHALLENGE

A diesel engine manufacturer based in Detroit faced frequent production delays. The cause of the inefficiency was its build book system. The manufacturer used a printed build book to communicate the specifications of the engine being built to the production floor. But, often after the book was sent to the shop floor, the manufacturer had to make changes to specifications. In such cases, those working on the production line would not be able to use the printed build book. Waiting for a reprinted book would halt production. As a result, the changes were usually communicated outside the manual and assumed to be followed. If the new specifications weren’t followed, they would be discovered only in quality assurance, leading to a loss of time and dollars.

SOLUTION

The client wanted a solution to resolve bottlenecks created by the printed build book and ensure compliance with build instructions. Ideally, the build book is dynamically pushed onto a handheld device assigned to the shop floor. The system would allow managers to update the specifications in the build book on the fly and alert the production team to the changes.

The device would also communicate the status of production to managers. For example, they would know which work center is working on an engine so that relevant pages of the build book could be updated and displayed to those work centers.

Iris custom-built an application that allowed real-time updates of the build book. It was designed to push the build book to work center operators on V10 devices (RFID transponders) with screen sizes ranging from 3 inches to 10 inches. The solution included a consolidated dashboard that provided the management near real-time visibility of work centers and the status of the engine production.

OUTCOMES

During Phase 1 of the project, we deployed 250 V10 devices. After a pilot run of four weeks, the client stopped printing build books; the handheld devices with our application were a superior alternative. The solution helped eliminate printing costs and allowed the manufacturer to accommodate last-minute changes in specifications without disrupting production.

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Pandemic pivot from physical to online tests

Education

Pandemic pivot from physical to online tests

System modernization helped a multinational educational testing and assessment organization overcome COVID-19 disruptions to deliver seamless and accurate digital testing.

Client

A leading U.S.-based educational testing and assessment services company

Goal

Switch from in-person to online testing

Tools and technologies

AWS Serverless, Dynamo DB, Node.js, Typescript, Java, Jenkins, and Angular

BUSINESS CHALLENGE

Our client, which provides educational testing and assessment services, faced an existential threat with the pandemic-era lockdowns and social distancing
requirements. The testing centers it operated at physical locations were unable to open, leaving thousands of students worldwide in a state of uncertainty.
Our client had to switch from in-person testing centers to a digital-first or online
testing solution almost overnight. To achieve that, it had to migrate rapidly from legacy systems to the cloud. It also needed to ensure the sanctity and accuracy of its tests while delivering a seamless digital experience to its customers. Other challenges included the ability to dynamically scale up or scale down capacity in response to demand, maintain acceptable service levels, and enable thousands of
expert test raters’ to access and evaluate tests.

SOLUTION

Iris Software stepped in to facilitate a strategic digital pivot in the business model to secure the company’s future. Modernization efforts that were underway at the company even before the pandemic were accelerated as a digital upgrade became imperative. We shifted the data stored on legacy infrastructure was to the cloud. Our team developed a new testing interface that would work overnight across devices, geographies, and different internet connections. Switching the testing operations to the cloud with scalable capacity could help manage the surge in the number of users for the tests Iris also deployed automation and AI tools to deliver superior experiences for test raters. Those who faced challenges while attempting to grade tests were provided with an always-on AI-based solution to automate the troubleshooting and ticketing process.

OUTCOMES

The client now has scalable, digital-first testing capabilities to meet all its testing requirements.

Cloud-based testing ensures that students, evaluators, and employees have access on-demand.
The remote testing options are accurate, secure and safe from external threats.
A strong focus on automation and user experience has allowed for optimized online offerings.
Surges in demand for tests can be met rapidly and at scale with minimal intervention.
Thanks to the always-on cloud offerings, service levels are easily maintained.
The successful digital pivot has led to strong interest in a hybrid operating model to safeguard the business from threats in the future.

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How to transform your risk reporting mechanisms

Capital Markets

How to transform your risk reporting

A leading brokerage firm improved its UI and lowered costs with a future-ready risk reporting platform.

Client

The client was a brokerage firm with a strong presence in the capital markets.

Goal

Improve risk reporting and calculations.

Tools and technologies

Dot Net, C#, Greenplum, JUX Proprietary Framework and HTML5.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE

The client's market risk reporting and limit monitoring platform was based on products that were reaching the end of their service lines in the foreseeable future — Microsoft's Silverlight for viewing rich content and IBM's Netezza for data warehousing. They wanted to move to a new-technology platform. Among the big challenges was a lack of user-friendliness, a high cost of ownership because of the maintenance needed, and a lack of scalability because the data could not be clustered. The existing systems did not enable efficient audit trails and tracking of users. Iris had to identify alternatives that would sit well with 55 other applications in the system.

SOLUTION

We considered building a visualization platform using the latest JavaScript frameworks such as Angular or React but settled on making a fresh user interface and UI framework on HTML5. We developed new UI widgets to provide better user experience, making it possible for users to customize their workspace. We integrated the module to manage a user’s role and access level. In all, we provided a modern, flexible interface for application deployment that was developed in-house.

OUTCOMES

We successfully moved all the 55 applications to the new platform. As a result, the total cost of ownership was expected to be 15% lower after the migration. It was also built for the future — a distributed, scalable, mobile-ready platform. It had an integrated module for managing user roles and access levels and could be customized with various themes to provide better user experience. User tracking and audit trails were enabled. 15% Lower total cost of ownership 55 Apps moved to new platform

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The power of in-sprint automation

Automation

The power of in-sprint automation

A large securities firm sped up time-to-market with end-to-end test automation on the cloud.

Client

A leading securities trading firm.

Goal

Build a cloud-based automation framework to test client’s trading platform.

Tools and technologies

C#, Ranorex, TestRail, Simulators and Selenium.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE

The client had a legacy trading platform that had grown and evolved over time. The platform consisted of a stack of 33 applications, built on a variety of technologies and architectures. Testing new features and additions was proving to be a big challenge. A simple change in one feature would warrant a verification of the complete application. To ensure that any change does not affect other functionality, the client needed to do extensive regression testing and verification. This was a cumbersome process with over 20,000 or 30,000 test cases being checked and executed manually. The trading firm had to deploy over 20 people to carry out this exercise. The client had tried to automate the testing process with a variety of tools but was not able to get the efficiencies it wanted. In addition, the client had multiple squads working on different apps, functionality and features. Each squad used its own automation suite. It was becoming a challenge to co-ordinate the work of the different squads and ensure that changes made by a squad did not impact the overall functionality of the platform. Iris’s brief was to design and deploy a common cloud-based test automation framework for the client’s trading platform to ensure that it could launch new features faster.

SOLUTION

Using its cloud-based ready-to-deploy test automation framework, Iris sped up the deployment of new features for the client’s trading platform. The cloud solution, based on Amazon Web Services (AWS), featured continuous testing of multiple products on a common framework layer. It allowed for complete capacity planning of spinned cloud instances and need-based shutdowns. Iris executed the project using acceptance test driven development (ATDD), a methodology that involves collaboration between customers, business teams and development teams. The teams jointly created the user stories and put down the acceptance criteria for any feature or functionality. Then tests were designed within the common framework to check if the feature met the acceptance criteria. What was unique about the approach? Typically, automation is introduced towards the end of a development cycle. You would find that, in most projects, developers bring in automation in Sprint 4 for features developed in Sprint 1, 2 and 3. As a result, return on investment isn’t maximized. Our team introduced ‘in-sprint’ automation, enabling 90% test automation with every sprint. This resulted in more efficient and faster testing, and cost savings for the client.

OUTCOMES

The client’s deployment speed improved significantly with 90% faster execution in each sprint cycle and 80% faster script development. The cloud-based solution is 100% configurable for on-demand execution on AWS, which reduced the client’s cloud infrastructure costs by 70%. The new ability for complete capacity planning through the use of infrastructure-as-code (IaC) for spinning up cloud instances helped the client achieve end-to-end (E2E) automation of regression/ functional test cases.

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Data consolidation speeds up drug search

Cloud

Data consolidation speeds up drug search

An automated cloud-based consolidation application for R&D data helped a pharmaceutical company improve turnaround time to create Approval for Product Release (APR) documents.

Client

A U.S.-based pharmaceutical multinational corporation.

Goal

Reduce turnaround time for APRs (Approval for Product Release).

Tools and technologies

Amazon’s AWS OPCx, Webmethods, natural language processing (NLP), neural networks, and Python programming

BUSINESS CHALLENGE

In pharmaceutical R&D, data is generated from several sources: the process, patients, retailers, and caregivers, among others. Pharmaceutical R&D organizations that use the traditional way of creating APRs manually consolidate paper specifications into binders across all R&D functions.

Specific regional rules, compliance mandates, and external regulations were slowing down the client’s workflow.

The many spreadsheets in multiple formats were leading to errors from manual entry and duplication of data — the inevitable “swivel effect” that results from data being pulled out from disparate, unconnected software packages.

Iris was approached to improve the process of collecting and using data from multiple sources; the improvement would help the client identify and develop new potential drug candidates faster.

SOLUTION

Iris’s team of 12 specialists designed, developed, tested, and deployed a cloud-based application that integrates data from multiple regions and eight different systems into a single, unified interface for the client’s users. Our application unified the creation and management of the client’s workflows across its lines of business and 20 different product families.

The development environment included Amazon’s AWS OPCx; Webmethods; natural language processing (NLP); neural networks; and Python programming.

OUTCOMES

Within a year of the application’s release, 2,800 users were using the application, with 55% of APRs turning around in 10 calendar weeks or less. Thanks to the in-memory data grid, the response time of transactions across the board has been brought down to nearly 2 seconds.

The cloud-based application developed by Iris ensures that data is automatically and seamlessly shared between systems that were previously stand-alone and required the tedious manual entry of data.

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Cloud-native app opens new markets

Cloud

Cloud-native app opens new markets

A prominent bonds trading network expands its market reach with new products and geographies.

Client

The world’s leading provider of trading services for fixed income products

Goal

Create an IT architecture to support growth across markets and products

Tools and technologies

AWS Cloud, Java, Springboot, React JS, React, Redis, Kafka, C#, Ranorex and Test Rails

BUSINESS CHALLENGE

The client, a market leader in bonds trading, was expanding to new markets, acquiring new businesses, introducing new products and adding features to existing offerings. To support its growth plans, it needed an agile, modern, cloud-based platform.

Some of the business needs the client wanted to address with the new solution were:

How do we achieve scale with minimal latency in operations and service?
How do we integrate new businesses seamlessly and without disruption?
How do we roll out new features faster to improve customer experience and get a competitive edge?
How can we use data to help customers make better trading decisions?
How can we monetize the data?

As a solution partner, we had to not only create a new IT architecture for the client’s trading platform but also constantly re-engineer and improve the architecture to quickly meet emerging business needs.

SOLUTION

We deployed a scalable, highly available auctions solution on the AWS cloud using Java, Springboot, React JS, React, Redis, and Kafka.

Optimized algorithms now achieve best matching with minimal latency while offering full price transparency. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) provide greater insight and real-time price discovery for specific asset classes.

The new cloud-based architecture enabled the client to create products and monetize market data. Those products helped customers get accurate data in real-time to take better and faster trading decisions.

Test automation across the trade lifecycle using a combination of C#, Ranorex, Test Rails helped the client update user interfaces (UI) without reducing performance. It also eased integration linkages between the acquired solution’s frontend and the client’s existing backend.

OUTCOMES

The introduction of Agile methodology and the cloud-native application has helped the client significantly speed up time-to-market for new releases – it is now able to make releases several times a year.

The new IT architecture now allows the client to offer trading in Muni bonds (an acquired product) and U.S. treasuries (a new service). The solution also enables the client to support Chinese markets.

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Real-time tracking of a global container fleet

Transportation & Logistics

Real-time tracking of a global container fleet

A cloud-based GPS-integrated solution delivered, for our client, real-time visibility of its shipments, bringing efficiencies in time, cost and regulatory compliance.

Client

A diversified global business group with a strong presence in maritime services.

Goal

Real-time tracking of a global container fleet.

Tools and technologies

Microsoft Azure, Node JS, C#, Bootstrap, and HTML5.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE

The pandemic has made it critical for transportation and logistics firms to manage their assets (or fleets) more efficiently.

Demand is high for real-time asset tracking and tracing solutions. For the marine services business of our client, real-time management of a global fleet of containers required continuous, global tracking.

Tracking the container fleet and meeting compliance requirements was laborious and error-prone, often leading to delays and lost opportunities. The client also did not have a mechanism to track customer usage of pay-per-use containers.

We were tasked with creating multi-tenant based cloud application that would be optimized for cost and yet not compromise the user experiences of customers and field teams.

SOLUTION

Our decade-long experience in radio-frequency identification (RFID) helped us address this challenge. Our information engineers, UX designers, solution architects, and business analysts worked onsite with the customer to test scenarios and create a new architecture along with new user experiences and interfaces.

We built the solution using the latest Microsoft Azure cloud services and BizTalk and RFID middleware for an integrated framework involving multiple customers (tenants) and services.

An offshore team engineered the new application with the capabilities sought by the client; the architecture team helped create new systems and environments for development, quality assurance (QA), user acceptance testing (UAT), and production. The solution was capable of handling large amounts of streaming data with the help of edge services located near-site. Customized workflows captured container movement within each site, while GPS services tracked container movement across the globe.

The application, which was deployed well within the scheduled deadline, enables post-production maintenance and enhancements from our offshore center.

OUTCOMES

We engineered real-time tracking and tracing for the client’s global container fleet, with map support and enhanced personalization for users based on location and asset class. Responsive design ensured that the application could be seamlessly used across various devices.

Our experience with RFID and cloud-based engineering helped us anticipate and prepare the scenarios well in advance so that solutions could be delivered to the client fast. This significantly reduced the time for the client to prepare cost and compliance status reports, and location-based dashboards for KPIs.

The near-real time tracking of containers reduced the time to calculate exact container usage and certificate status from days and hours to a few minutes.

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A legacy portfolio gets a makeover

Integration Modernization

Mobility | Software product companies

Conquering the cloud

Iris developed a multi-device mobile ticketing and permitting application that seamlessly integrated with local government systems using cloud technology for more efficient law enforcement.

Conquering the cloud

Iris developed a multi-device mobile ticketing and permitting application that seamlessly integrated with local government systems using cloud technology for more efficient law enforcement.

Conquering the cloud

Iris developed a multi-device mobile ticketing and permitting application that seamlessly integrated with local government systems using cloud technology for more efficient law enforcement.

Conquering the cloud

Iris developed a multi-device mobile ticketing and permitting application that seamlessly integrated with local government systems using cloud technology for more efficient law enforcement.

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Advisory & Consulting

A legacy portfolio gets a makeover

How one of the Big Four advisory firms turned around an under-performing, high-cost application portfolio to meet growing business needs.

Client

The client is one of the Big Four advisory firms.

Goal

Modernize the legacy application to meet growing business needs.

Tools and technologies

MS SharePoint, MS .Net and MS SQL Server.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE

The client had multiple legacy applications, deployed over the years. Its business needs had grown with time and the applications were falling short of required service levels. The client faced the following challenges:

Lack of integration: Most of the integration with upstream and downstream systems was manual, resulting in common data getting obsolete quickly.
The client was finding it difficult and expensive to hire and retain resources to maintain the legacy apps.
The legacy system was prone to security breaches and couldn’t be deployed on the enterprise-level stack.
The existing system supported only single-user applications, and it wasn’t possible to roll them out to multiple users.

SOLUTION

After a comprehensive analysis, we rationalized, classified and distributed the client’s applications portfolio in four areas: 1) upgrade and continue to maintain; 2) rewrite to modernize; 3) consolidate overlapping applications using a framework approach; and, 4) retire. The idea was to deliver maximum value at the lowest cost possible and ensure the system complied with security standards. Here’s what we did for the client:

Upgraded the technology stack for the application(s) to lower maintenance costs, improve efficiency and meet growing business needs.
Used an in-house technology modernization framework to reduce development and maintenance costs.
Consolidated applications that were doing similar tasks and had similar features and modernized them.
Retired applications, whose features were available through other applications.

The success of our solution was based on our ability to quickly gather complete information about the existing applications. To do that, we used a questionnaire that we have developed and refined over the years that helps us gather information in a structured and comprehensive manner about the architecture, user base, maintenance methodology, etc.

OUTCOMES

With the legacy modernization and application consolidation process, we reduced the client’s application portfolio from 45 applications to less than 10.
Reduced the resources required for maintenance from six to two.
The framework-based approach accelerated time-to-market, a critical differentiator for the client.

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An agile sprint for financial data

How Iris helped a mega sportswear brand’s global operations and financial reports go flexible, agile, and analytical.

Client

Among the world’s largest manufacturers of sportswear, the client sells its products in more than 120 countries and employs more than 13,000 people.

Goal

To significantly reduce turnaround time and ease associated with report creation.

Tools and technologies

Microsoft SQL Server’s Analysis Services (SSAS), Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS), Boomi AtomSphere, and Power BI.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE

The client’s finance department was using standard SAP reports which limited the flexibility to slice and dice data or add fields to reports. Modifying or creating new reports was either difficult or expensive. Top management, including the CFO and financial controllers, were finding it difficult to create a high-level, integrated view of the company’s finances. The existing process required data transposition between various systems, including the SAP and Oracle systems. Much of this data was extracted and consolidated manually, which was time-consuming, and took around a week.

SOLUTION

Iris executed a distributed Agile framework for the client’s global delivery model. Our solution pulled data out of the client’s SAP ERP system using Dell Boomi adapters, and leveraged SSIS (SQL server integration services) to transform it into enriched data. This data was mapped and made actionable through interactive PowerBI Tableau dashboards. With the help of a custom-made finance data model, a data warehouse was created. The easily shareable data cubes not only replaced all legacy reports, but also reduced the number of SAP user licenses.

OUTCOMES

With the availability of Power BI dashboards and the capability to slice-and-dice financial data, client managers now have a better view of operations and accounting flows. The data consolidation allows users to create need-based reports without additional licenses. The automation of the entire process from data extraction and transformation to publishing of analytical cubes has enabled the client teams to significantly reduce time required to produce reports – from days to a few minutes. They have been able to achieve a 95% reduction in time and effort.

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Gen AI interface enhances API productivity and UX

Gen AI summarization solution aids lending app users

Quality engineering optimizes a DLT platform

Gen AI interface enhances API productivity and UX

Industries

Services

Gen AI summarization solution aids lending app users

AI-powered summarization boosts compliance workflow

Iris continues to shine as one of India’s Best Workplaces for Women

NMSDC Annual Conference & Exchange October 2024

Discover the Iris difference

Supporting and investing in our employees

Banking

Data science and AI transform disclosure and reporting

Client

Goal

Tools and technologies

BUSINESS CHALLENGE

SOLUTION

OUTCOMES

Contact

Manufacturing

Powering efficiency on the shop floor

Client

Goal

Tools and technologies

BUSINESS CHALLENGE

SOLUTION

OUTCOMES

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Contact

Education

Pandemic pivot from physical to online tests

Client

Goal

Tools and technologies

BUSINESS CHALLENGE

SOLUTION

OUTCOMES

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Quality engineering optimizes a DLT platform

Gen AI interface enhances API productivity and UX

Release automation reduces testing time by 80%

Contact

Capital Markets

How to transform your risk reporting

Client

Goal

Tools and technologies

BUSINESS CHALLENGE

SOLUTION

OUTCOMES

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Next generation chatbot eases data access

Data warehouse enhances client communications

Brokerage platform transformation improves UX

Contact

Automation

The power of in-sprint automation

Client

Goal

Tools and technologies

BUSINESS CHALLENGE

SOLUTION

OUTCOMES

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Quality engineering optimizes a DLT platform

Gen AI interface enhances API productivity and UX

Quality engineering for Blockchain-DLT platform

Contact

Cloud

Data consolidation speeds up drug search

Client

Goal

Tools and technologies

BUSINESS CHALLENGE

SOLUTION