Case Study

Amentra Delivers Business Focused Rich Internet Application for The Carlyle Group

The Carlyle Group
Service:
Systems Development, SOA Integration
Industry:
Finance
Engagement:
Full Lifecycle Implementation
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Adobe Flex Technology Leveraged To Create Dynamic Full-Featured Financial Application On The Web

Before Amentra

The Carlyle Group, one of the world’s largest private equity firms, was looking to automate the internal business processes that managed employee performance evaluations, promotions, bonuses and salary increases. These processes were highly manual and cumbersome, relying on spreadsheets emailed among various managers and department heads. Spreadsheets remained static after initial compilation leading to stale data upon later review. The process lacked appropriate role-based security and necessary integrations with back office systems, such as human resources and accounting, causing the process to be insecure and error-prone.

After Amentra

  • Web-based, rich user-interface for executing key business processes
  • Technology and Business Process Alignment
  • Significantly Increased Business Process Accuracy and Efficiencies
  • Achieved Critical Reliability and High Availability
  • Real-Time Integration with Back Office Systems including HR, Accounting,and Data Warehouse
  • SSO Integration with Active Directory

Evolution Of Business Process

Amentra collaborated with the firm through a highly effective iterative development methodology in order to meet the hard deadlines for the mission critical initiative. The compensation evaluation process compiled data from all of Carlyle’s back office systems to provide the users with the most up-to-date information for making informed decisions. The User Interface (UI), designed and implemented using Adobe Flex 2, delivered a rich user experience while maintaining performance and a familiar set of controls so that little end-user training was required. Role-based security was established using Carlyle’s Active Directory to ensure sensitive employee data was appropriately protected and made visible to only entitled users. The system fed information back into Carlyle’s HR system of record, accounting system and data warehouse for business intelligence. The web-based application was developed and deployed in under three months, and is utilized worldwide out of Carlyle’s offices in 21 countries.

Amentra designed and implemented the Flex UI in an aggressive Agile environment in order to garner continuous user feedback. The project introduced Carlyle’s business users to the possibilities made available by the latest generation of web presentation technologies, including Adobe Flex. This evolution has set the foundation to enable The Carlyle Group to web-enable a wide variety of business processes across a number of complex financial applications.

Applied Technologies and Expertise

Amentra utilized its proven methodology and industry best practices to deliver a highly performant, robust, scalable and easy-to-use system.

The challenge in the presentation tier was to create an interactive spreadsheet, with a user interface similar to Microsoft Excel. This was accomplished using Adobe’s fast-emerging Flex technology. The rich capabilities of this technology, along with Amentra’s use of best practices, allowed for:

  • Business calculations to be performed in real-time as a user enter data
  • Over 40 spreadsheet columns to be customized by either user preference or user
  • Significantly reduced network traffic between the client and server, making worldwide use possible without the need for co-location of servers
  • Integration with other systems such as Carlyle’s business intelligence reporting system

Amentra leveraged Midnight Coders WebORB, a proven framework that allows Flex and .NET technologies to work together seamlessly, as a proxy between the Flex client and Microsoft .NET 3.0 web services. These in turn utilized Microsoft .NET 3.0 (WCF and WF) frameworks to provide web service integration with Carlyle back-end data stores and to automate business tasks. The server persistence mechanism was implemented using Microsoft SQL Server 2005.

Technologies used

  • Adobe Flex 2
  • Midnight Coders WebORB
  • Microsoft .NET 3.0 Framework
  • Microsoft SQL Server 2005
  • Microsoft Active Directory

To find out how Amentra can help you please call 804.355.9360 or visit www.amentra.com