OSB TIP: A Proxy Service Which Can Take Any XML Data to any JMS Queue in Oracle Service Bus
How to make Warranty Claims Management work for you?
It is accepted that managing warranty claims is one of the most daunting tasks in the warranty lifecycle. Managing large amounts of data brings the possibility of errors at different levels. Such errors can impact the image and overall functioning of an organization. Current trends in managing warranty claims The current trend of managing warranty claims data involves manual management. The challenge of a manual approach is its failure to integrate with the ongoing enhancements in business processes. Several other negative implications include cost mismanagement, operational discrepancies, customer dissatisfaction, and quality issues. Is there a right approach? Due to erroneous processing of warranty claims, organizations have to incur huge revenue lapses. The right approach to correcting and maintaining warranty claims is to automate all key business policies and procedures through a comprehensive warranty claims solution. A robust system will improve the claims process and assist in building strategic plans to detect product failures early. That will help shorten the claims-processing cycle and maintain the ongoing improvement of end-to-end warranty claims management. In greater numbers, organizations are opting for a closed loop warranty systems that direct, process, and track warranties as well as provide feedback for continuous improvement across product lifecycles. This helps in optimizing product pricing and improving customer satisfaction while minimizing costs. Industry Example A specialist technology provider of manufacturing advanced food-processing equipment had plans to expand its service operations across South European regions. Implementing common processes and operations of manufacturing equipment was highly critical. This would assist in streamlining the processes, building a brand image, and gaining better control of the business and revenue management. Business Challenge The organization was exploring options to enhance its productivity by scaling the existing processes. One of the processes that needed immediate improvement pertained to the warranty claims management system. As the process was managed through a manual legacy system, it hampered productivity tremendously. Problems the company faced: Ineffective claim management due to manual tracking and management systems Communication channels were not automated which led to process errors Turnaround time and resources for project completion increased Inefficient management of the highly customized legacy due to lack of manpower. As a corrective measure, and to improve product quality, customer satisfaction, and profitability, the organization decided to implement comprehensive warranty enhancement solutions. The Solution A warranty management solution with advanced predictive techniques was implemented to identify fraudulent and inappropriate claims. New rules were added to improve claims precision and ROI. The solution provided rich functionality for registrations, claims management, returns & supplier management, and parts returns. The results were astounding. 95% of warranty issues were resolved. Warranty claims dropped by more than 60% in less than 2 years. The client experienced a series of business benefits such as effective cost, time and customer management, and saved huge amounts in customer service costs. The new system was flexible, easy to maintain, and highly scalable for future business enhancements.
Data Migration Challenges
According to a Gartner/Standish group study, 67% of data migration projects suffer from implementation delays. Given the importance of data in the modern enterprise, flawed data migration can have severe repercussions. A nuanced understanding of the various challenges in Data migration is required to mitigate many of the risks associated with this activity. Importance of Data Quality As with most data integration efforts, data quality is one of the biggest challenges in data migration and some of the challenges are: Given the non-recurring nature of most data migrations, handling data quality issues in a live post-migration environment can be very challenging. Poor data quality imposes significant costs post-migration, with issues ranging from poor business intelligence to delay/disruption in business processes. Data quality issues are amplified when migration happens from a legacy system (with poor data quality) to a newer application with a far richer feature set and a stricter data model. This necessitates a lot of planning before the migration process can commence. Solutions to manage Data Migration effectively To ensure good data quality coverage, complete profiling of the source data systems must be conducted. This process must be complemented with the reconciliation of business rules across the source and target systems. Both these activities, when completed with the involvement of all relevant stakeholders will provide the data migration team with a lot of insights into data/rule gaps between the source & target systems and help create data validation/transformation rules to be used in migration. These rules can be further fine-tuned by accounting for deduplication and consolidation if necessary (For instance, when multiple source systems are involved). If the target system is still evolving/being built, strong change management processes need to be put in place to ensure the data migration process keeps up with application changes. Choosing the right technology/tool stack is one of the biggest decisions that awaits the migration team. The choices range from a custom-built solution, data integration tools to a hybrid solution. While there are merits and drawbacks to each choice, the flexibility and comprehensive data integration capabilities offered by modern ETL tools make them a compelling choice. Many of these tools offer integrated development environments that speed up the development process and provide plenty of customization capabilities through scripting/reusability. The data migration solution offered by Tavant uses Talend, an open-source tool that provides a robust data integration toolkit and Java/Perl based scripting allowing for significant customization. Other technology challenges include differences between the underlying source/target database systems (mismatches in terms of data types supported, date/time format mismatches etc), encrypted data, and handling of character encoding and numeric precision. A good data quality management process and technology solution need to be backed up with a good operational process that can support an iterative data migration validation/ implementation process. Other operational challenges that need to be factored in are the migration of hot data (active business transactions) and the creation of failback provisions. A robust data testing strategy is required to not only ensure that all data within scope is migrated but also that the migrated data is functionally usable on the target system(s). Finally, an experienced data migration team can drastically cut down on the learning curve and hit the ground running. While each data migration project has its own dynamic, a good understanding of challenges and best practices can significantly reduce the chances of running into common data migration roadblocks. Recognition of these challenges will also ensure that the data migration process receives the support it requires.
5 Reasons Why Coded UI is the Right Step Forward in QA Automation
The robust capabilities of Visual Studio and TFS (Team Foundation Server) have made them hot favourites for building business applications. The combined usage of TFS, Visual Studio and their test tools, augment the process of agile development efficiently (through different phases of development including continuous integration). In the recent past, I have noticed a growing trend in the usage of TFS as an integrated solution for project management, application life cycle management and source control. In this blog, I provide a glimpse into the major factors which drive test experts and architects to evangelize Coded UI (a part of Visual Studio) as a standard automation framework from a software test catalyst standpoint. Testing engineers and developers can work using the same tools/language, enabling them to collaborate effectively. Coded UI tests are compatible with both Web and Windows projects and C# is known for its robustness. Of course, there are many popular feature enriched test tools available in the market, but most of them only support testing of Web applications. When we review the supported configurations and platforms of coded UI tests, we can see its extensive support across multiple levels Incorporating the built-in features of Coded UI into parent class wrappers extends test capabilities and enables testers to leverage the use of APIs by inheriting them into their own frameworks as they evolve. Extended features available in the test controller and test agents provide for: Developing an extensive test suite and testing in local environment The ability to regularly run the test suite remotely in a Lab environment providing for increased efficiency and productivity with comprehensive regression. Using Coded UI with layered framework offers high flexibility to develop sophisticated tests. For example, CUITe Framework (Coded UI Test enhanced) is a Codeplex project, a thin layer over Coded UI. This breed of tools, by its mature features, make tests readable, maintainable, resilient & robust – a testimony to the fact that our claims about the framework are accurate. To conclude, I agree with technical COE’s who recommend the above combination of tools and promise several new and incredible features in the near future. Yes! Selecting Coded UI will be the right step forward in the world of QA Automation. While Coded UI tests are not new, it is only in the recent past that test architects are accepting the fact that Coded UI is a great way to resolve issues present in general test tools. If you started off reading this blog with reservations about the possibility of using Coded UI to automate applications and enhance efficiency, the 5 reasons listed above should establish a strong case for Coded UI in QA Automation.
Relational Models – Where Is The Bottleneck?
There are several reasons for the downfall of relational databases and before I start off with the various aspects of NoSQL designs, I would like to highlight a few factors which have made relational models a misfit for global applications today. Manual Intervention:Relational databases were designed in an era when human workforce was cheaper than technology. Thus, relational models have a lot of gaps. For example, data distribution, sharding, partitioning and similar functions are mostly managed through human intervention. Expensive Vertical Scalability:Relational model designs rely heavily on the underlying hardware’s capacity and quality for performance. They were never designed for clustered storage and operation. Thus, to upgrade a relational database’s capacity it has been necessary to upgrade server hardware which increases costs substantially. REDO and UNDO logs:Persistent REDO logs slow down the write performance as every write operation is recorded in REDO logs. UNDO logs are also updated for each transaction, slowing down the system considerably. Transaction Support Through Two-Phase Commit:Two-phase-commit transactions (used to ensure consistency) are known to degrade performance. Rigid Schema Design:RDBMS architecture requires fixed schema designs. All tables and columns need to be pre-defined along with the data type and length constraints. Most of today’s applications generate a lot of unstructured/semi structured data. What is required today is a flexible schema free architecture for storing such data. REDO and UNDO logs are used by relational databases to ensure ACID compliance of transactions. Getting rid of these persistent logs would be a huge performance booster but that would make them ACID non-compliant. Considerable design changes are needed to make the relational databases horizontally scalable and schema free. We can therefore conclude that a highly efficient and scalable database must have the following characteristics: • It must be designed to work in distributed architecture,• It must be horizontally scalable,• It must have memory based caching mechanism, and,• It must not make use of REDO and UNDO logs. (However, one must remember the fact that getting rid of REDO and UNDO logs will improve performance but such databases may not be ACID compliant and may not support transactions). NoSQL databases offer all the advantages mentioned above and they offer the right fit for most applications. Obviously they are here to stay! Do you agree or have you come across some hitches with NoSQL which makes you believe that there are other, better databases available today?
Mobile UI Automation Testing Tools
UI automation testing of web applications has seen a large number of good innovations in recent years but the same cannot be said for the mobile automation segment which is still in a nascent stage of development. This segment suffers from platform fragmentation and limited number of automation tools, all of which are probably responsible for its slow growth. Thankfully, at least in the recent past, we are seeing some tools emerging for UI automation of mobile devices, but each come with their own pros and cons. In this blog, I have tried to compare some of the popular open source mobile UI automation tools against various set factors to help developers assess the suitability of such tools to meet their requirements. These tools mainly target the iOS and Android platforms. Even though it seems, at present, that we cannot automate every feature of an app, we can still benefit from mobile automation testing… Some of the key advantages are: • Continuous integration testing • Consistent and repeatable testing process • Improved regression tests • Parallelize testing on multiple devices • Improved coverage in shorter time – more tests can be run in less time. • Better resources utilization – 24/7 operation • Manual testing of the features that cannot be automated • Simple reproduction of found defects • Improved testing efficiency Platform specific automation tools (for example, performance, analysis and testing) are provided by phone OS vendors, i.e. iOS provides Instruments Tool and Android does the same with the Monkeyrunner Tool. But we are looking for a unified solution, which can allow us to code once and then test on multiple platforms. Also these tools should ideally overcome challenges, like, not providing the record and play options, or the need to learn multiple languages to write scripts etc. Here is the comparison of mobile UI automation tools: Hence, in conclusion, after examining all the tools that are out there, I found both Appium and MonkeyTalk measure up quite well but I believe the best tool out there is Appium, since it provides better control to edit recorded scripts.
3 Reasons to Provide Mobile Experience to In-store Customers
How can Mobile solutions help In-store Banking? Mobile experts have been trying to find answers to these kind of questions to help them grow their business. Though this may be applicable to other retail businesses, in this blog, we are keeping our focus on Financial Services entities alone. Going ‘Mobile-Friendly’ is the trend in this space too, and it is challenging the traditional business model, as expected. The traditional business model (‘In-store’) refers to a brick and mortar concept on which many Financial Services companies have chosen to build their fortune. However, with the recent changes in the world of technology, brick and mortar is increasingly giving way to newer means and customers are rarely visiting the branches for all their financial needs. With the increased mobile-savvy customer, new Mobile applications are paving speedy inroads into the brick and mortar businesses of the Financial empire. Many organizations are at crossroads and they are trying the reinvention route to make themselves relevant in today’s world in the hopes of reducing the exposure to the stores and concentrating on the growth of their online business. Hence, in this tough environment, the growth of the ‘Mobile Model’ has become like a direct competitor to the in-store business model, but, surprisingly, there are ways going mobile can help instead of being a hindrance. 1. Operational efficiency Many In-stores that sell financial products like Loans, securities etc., have this challenge of scaling up during the peak hours as their infrastructure is usually very limited. Queues are not an uncommon sight at these times. We have noticed that use of Mobile apps can bring in operational efficiency in this regard. 2. Service time reduced Customers need to fill in a lot of details in multiple forms. During peak hours customer dissatisfaction can be eliminated by allowing them to fill the details of their name, address and copy of their id proof details using their cell phones. This helps reduce the time to service and helps in faster transactions. E.g., this concept is similar to the online-check-in that is done in airports. Another popular example is Starbucks, customers who are waiting in line can pre-order their coffee and then collect. 3. Drive in-store sales Another unique challenge increasing the footfall into the store. Thankfully, Mobility can help here too: Location based messaging Many Stores uses a Geo-tagged banner ad and location-based SMS. Marketers can use SMS based messaging system to broadcast their campaign to reach the targeted customers. Location based search Customers are increasingly using location-based mobile search to identify nearby stores. This becomes paramount to advertise in-store locations, details and offers on the digital media. ROI for the Mobile In-store customers Calculating the ROI for the Mobile In-store customers is challenging. However, companies started cracking this puzzle when they started reliably predicting the investment needed in Mobile to drive the in-store customers to predict the ROI. For e.g., in one of the Google-Adidas case studies, Adidas was able to track statistically the customers who visited their website/online ad through their cell phones and hence track the revenue generation. Mobile database Collecting the Mobile numbers of potential customers and encouraging push notifications to Apps helps in knowing the customers and build profiles as an incentive. Analytics Collecting Mobile-specific data from in-store customers like Mobile usage, etc., which will help formulate future mobile strategies. Going SoLoMo Having an optimal strategy to integrate Social, Location in Mobile (SoLoMo) to target the customers helps reduce the silos between offline and online marketing. In conclusion, any help offered in this blog is solely based on my experiences with numerous financial services clients. Hope you are able to get your Mobile strategy off the ground and suitable predict future trends that may come in use for your business. FAQs – Tavant Solutions How does Tavant enable mobile lending experiences for retail store customers?Tavant provides mobile-optimized lending platforms that integrate seamlessly with retail point-of-sale systems, enabling instant credit applications, real-time approvals, and digital loan processing at the store level. Their technology allows customers to complete lending applications on mobile devices while shopping, creating seamless purchase-to-financing experiences. What mobile lending capabilities does Tavant offer for retail store integration?Tavant offers mobile-responsive applications, QR code integration for instant access, offline capability for areas with poor connectivity, integration with store inventory systems, mobile document capture, and real-time decision engines that work within retail environments to provide immediate financing options. Why is mobile lending important for retail stores?Mobile lending is important for retail stores because it increases sales conversion rates, enables larger purchase amounts, provides instant financing options, improves customer satisfaction, reduces abandoned purchases due to financing constraints, and creates competitive advantages over stores without mobile lending options. How does mobile lending work in retail stores?Mobile lending in retail stores works through integrated point-of-sale systems that offer financing options during checkout, mobile apps that customers can download for instant applications, QR codes that link to lending applications, and tablets or mobile devices that store associates use to help customers apply for financing. What are the benefits of mobile lending for store customers?Mobile lending benefits for store customers include instant financing decisions, convenient application processes, ability to complete purchases immediately, access to competitive rates, simplified documentation requirements, and the flexibility to shop and apply for financing simultaneously. How does Tavant implement AI-based quality engineering for lending systems?Tavant uses AI-powered testing automation, predictive quality analytics, and intelligent defect detection to ensure lending system reliability. Their quality engineering approach includes automated test case generation, real-time performance monitoring, and machine learning algorithms that identify potential issues before they impact system performance or customer experience. What advantages does Tavant AI-based quality engineering provide?Tavant AI-based quality engineering delivers faster testing cycles, higher defect detection rates, predictive maintenance capabilities, and continuous quality improvement. Their approach reduces manual testing time by 70%, improves system reliability, and ensures lending platforms maintain optimal performance under varying load conditions. What is AI-based quality engineering?AI-based quality engineering uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate testing processes, predict system failures, optimize test
Warranty Analytics – Integrating Value with Returns
The global economic downturn is impacting organizations across all industries and businesses are struggling to improve bottom line results. The automobile industry is no different. Managing costs, tracking fraudulent claims, and improving customer satisfaction are some of the major concerns for organizations in the warranty management environment. Close to 70% of the warranty expenses dwindle due to repetitive failure in the performance of parts. Identifying the root cause of such failures is the one of the biggest challenges in the industry today. How can organizations thrive in such an environment? Warranty Analytics is the only solution. Making correct use of the opportunity requires robust warranty analytics that can integrate raw data into actionable plans to accomplish the desired results. Successful organizations leverage that as the key to increasing revenue and optimizing customer success. Analytics is the application of statistical tools that convert raw data into business solutions. It incorporates a predictive technique to review future trends and improvise current processes. Insights gained through analytics add value to all the key spectrums of a business, including customer management, product quality, and process enhancement. Analytics solutions give a microscopic view into key business functions along with statistical features, predictive analyses, and forecasts for optimal business decisions. Analytics helps assess gaps and analyze the root cause of individual elements that hamper overall processes. Detecting the root cause enables companies to determine the best course of action and save on costs through early detection of failures. It further helps organizations improve resource allocation and realign focus on core strategic functions. Business Case Study A leading manufacturing unit with operations in 26 countries specializes in products and services across industries. It offers services such as protecting food and perishables, securing homes, and enhancing industrial efficiency and productivity. Each business function has multiple units with varied requirements. Those units used ad hoc retrieval methods that resulted in inefficiency in tracking failure patterns and measuring ROI from individual units. The organization had also branched out lately to wider geographical boundaries. The lack of inventory management and a centralized system proved a potential business threat. The organization needed a comprehensive warranty system that maximizes the utility of data for optimal business growth. The Solution A centralized web-based warranty solution was integrated to obtain a clearer perspective on parts failures, fraudulent claim processing, and better customer management. The software-based analytics system helped in providing operational feedback, turnaround time, parts performance, and determining the warranty cost per product. Some of the benefits experienced through warranty analytics: • Improved customer loyalty, product quality & brand image • Early detection of parts failures with an increase in bottom line results • Effective management of claims processing and warranty reserves • Predictive analysis to increase financial performance • Warranty cost management to understand and manage expenses • Smoother transactions between units and greater information flow • Faster and easier settlement of warranty claims Those benefits when enjoyed together can bring an organization exceptional advantage. Much like the manufacturing organization in the case study, Warranty Analytics is being used by more and more businesses that aim to thrive with higher returns and greater customer success.
Tavant Warranty Systems – One for All
Among the majority of Warranty Management Systems across industries, each one is becoming highly customized to meet only one business functionality. Although customizing a system for a product or line of business helps, the conventional approach can result in multiple instances of the same application with only minor change in operation. That does not help the system attain a just price in terms of the value it adds to an organization. So what is the future then? Is it really possible to have a system that: • Can be tailored to business needs • Is cost-effective • Enables synergy between business ideas & expertise • Is a proven success • Will allow me to stop experimenting with my business continuously The short answer is YES. But how? Here at Tavant, we have built, nourished and enhanced our Warranty Management product offering ‘TWMS’– ‘Tavant Warranty Management System’ for the past 12 years. We have helped our customers, whose businesses started off with independent instances, to collaborate and merge into a single instance. The result that we have now is a powerful global system that houses all businesses, irrespective of their linguistic and zonal differences. It is meeting their specific demands and requirements, without costing them much for the value it is bringing, day in and day out, by easing the operations at work. It is natural that you might be wondering as to how that is possible when all businesses never have the same requirements. Across businesses, differences at various levels exist in terms of operation. But are businesses using TWMS compromising on system functionality or operation mode? No. We understand that every business is unique and has its own distinct operation. So we provide options in functionality. Business administrators have the option to tweak their systems as understood fit. More importantly, they are empowered to alter the course of system operations for their businesses through the system itself. If at any point a change made is found undesirable, it could be reverted. Alright, I am beginning to like this! It is pretty similar to what we want, but how does it stand out in the crowd when every other system does exactly that? It does stand out. It is a ‘Multiple Business on a Single Instance’ system. What’s more? You don’t pay for the whole system. You really needn’t write that big fat check to own the system. The cost would be shared between the businesses which are part of it. The council, comprising leaders who run the business, meet periodically to share their ideas and concepts on improving and automating the system further. So it is not just the cost that is shared. With it comes the synergy of expertise and knowledge from multiple experts, which I believe, is truly priceless. Finally, I will wind up leaving you to a choice: Lose ground by competing or share an advantage by collaborating. Let’s learn to work together when it’s the right thing to do!
AngularJS; Easy, Clear and Succinct!
I recently had an excellent opportunity to work on AngularJS as a part of an extended project responsibility. I was overwhelmed by the ease associated with this structural framework for dynamic web apps. Here is why I believe one should start exploring and using AngularJS: Build templates directly in HTML One can build properly structured web applications using AngularJS expressions, directives, filters and data binding. Expressions can be executed within the HTML pages. For example: <div>1+1 = {{1+1}}</div> Will result in 1+1 = 2 Directives – are used for structuring a page. For example: ng-repeat repeats the creation of new set of elements in the dom for each element in a collection. <div> <div data-ng-repeat=”users in user”> <h2 >{{user.name}}</h2> <h3>{{user.desc}}</h3> </div> </div> Filters – changes the display of data in the page. For example: We can place the name in upper case with {{user.name | uppercase}} Data Binding – Provides automatic synchronization of data between the model and view components, thereby helps in binding data in scope and content of view. We can also perform bidirectional data binding where change in content of view also makes real time updates to data in scope for example: <div> <div data-ng-repeat=”users in user”> <h2 >{{user.name}}</h2> <h3>{{user.desc}}</h3> Edit Description: <br /> <textarea rows = “5” col=”20” data-ng-model = “user.desc”> </div> </div> Easy implementation of REST REST has become a standard for communication between servers and clients. I discovered that with Angular JS, one line of code allows us to ‘talk’ to the server and revert with data for the web page. Write less code With AngularJS, as shown in the code above, the view can be defined within HTML. You can also use filters to change the data at view level i.e., within HTML without touching the controllers. It also removes the necessity to write getters/setters in data models. Always be unit test ready Though this aspect bears to undergo more research and analysis, to explore it in more detail, there is literature that proves that AngularJS has a mock HTTP provider that provides fake server responses to the controller instead of the person creating test pages that invoke a component and interact with it for testing purposes. In conclusion, AngularJS has capabilities that allow you to express an application’s components clearly and succinctly. It makes the development and testing implementations easy and pleasant. It is certain that you cannot become an expert instantly but, my experience articulates it as easy to develop and all it requires is familiarity with a Model–View–Controller (MVC). So go head and start exploring.