Silicon Systems is a Wokingham, U.K.-based company delivering leading-edge, highly supported IT solutions. Flowmation, its primary product, combines Digital Asset Management (DAM) and Project Management tools to help advertising, print and publishing firms easily organize their assets into projects that are accessible to both local and remote project participants. Flowmation was initially developed by staff in-house. However, as Silicon’s user base grew, end-user support and customer requests for more functionality increasingly began to absorb more time and effort. The current team could no longer handle the requests, and at the same time it did not seem possible to expand it quickly and at reasonable cost within the UK.
Silicon started to consider the outsourcing option and finally chose Intetics as a technology partner and its Offshore Dedicated Team (ODT) as a cooperation model for distinct advantages it provides: expert management consulting, complete process setting, project and relationship governance on Intetics’ side and full control over the offshore team given to the Client.
Continuos support of operational database that manages IKEA™ Family loyalty program customers. ODB system also synchronizes data with central IKEA IT and Marketing databases on daily/weekly basis.
The system consists of several major components:
Solution is a new platform for cross-media newsroom management targeted at medium-size and large publishing houses. It helps to plan appointments, manage stories, co-ordinate staff, control beats, and streamline cross-media workflows. Thus, it makes the whole range of publishing processes less time-consuming and therefore a lot more productive. In the developed system stories and appointments can be easily assigned to employees. Every user has his/her own personal site where his/her assignments can be tracked. A simple and easy-to-use “Notes” function enables managers to inform their staff. Specific days and sections can be selected for targeted communication. Personnel – internal or external – can get access to certain sections only, thus being restricted in viewing information that is not directly related to their work. Automated email notifications are sent out to inform users about new entries or changes in existing ones. Nowadays the service is used by about 8 companies and the number of customers continues to expand.
A set of web applications for booking restaurant reservations, parking tickets and disable seats for games and other club events which were developed using modern, proved and reliable open source frameworks. Applications also have functionality to generate different kinds of statistical and marketing reports in different formats (XML, XLS, PDF); report scheduling functionality is also embedded in the applications.
The cooperation of two companies started with delivering a pilot project built upon a traditional time-and-material business model. After a successful trial Intetics was contracted for designing a major ODT-based project with all the processes being transferred to the Minsk development center. Iterative development methodology applied by the team enabled the Client to keep a check on and influence the whole development process. A year of close cooperation resulted in a profound application delivered to the mobile telecom market. After its launch the team has implemented two major upgrades to the system, and is now providing regular enhancements to the interfaces, functionality and database content.