Cubevo Data Concept

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

We are a NTT DATA Company, dedicated to consulting and outsourcing in all sectors, with a turnover of EUR 1.43 billion in the last financial year. We are a large family with 24,500 professionals across Europe, USA and Latin America.

In 2014 we joined NTT DATA Group, the sixth-largest IT services company in the world with 100,000 professionals and with offices in Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, Europe, Latin America and North America.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Cubevo Data Concept?

Pharmaceutical companies employ medical representatives to promote their products. Each rep is assigned to a territory for which he or she is responsible.

Due to the fact that there are many lines of products to be promited, many territories and many reps, and adding the fact that the structures change almost on a daily basis, it becomes difficult to keep track on who is assigned to what territory and what he/she is promoting.

What were your goals for this project?

We needed to build a tool which enabled us to provide our pharma clients with an easy way to manage this process.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

This vendor worked for us on some important projects in tha past. It always provided us high level services.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

We already had a rough idea of what needed to be done at least at a functional level. The procedures were carried out manually but they took a lot of time and were prone to human error. The vendor developed an application that connects to the final client's data systems (Salesforce among others, in this particular case), for data acquisition.

The ingested data was then enriched and transformed using a series of procedures implemented in Python with heavy use of the Pandas framework. The final result was a report that reflected the then-actual situation and was to be loaded into the sistem, to reflect the changes.

They also built a web frontend that allows us to control al the execution parameters and follow up on the progress of the current run. The frontend was implemented in HTML, CSS, JS + Bootstrap. All the application was completely integrated with the Windows OS as it was installed and running on our cloud-based Windows Server instance.

What was the team composition?

The team was composed of two persons of which one acted as developer and PM and the other as developer.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

We initially tried to implement the system as a series of MySQL stored procedures but not only was it very slow but it also generated a lot of errors and was limited in functionality. All in all, after implementing the Python app realized by this vendor, we managed to drastically reduce execution time from a few days (done manually) to apout 30-40 minutes.

We also managed to reduce the execution errors that caused other versions to stop, thus making it impossible for us to deliver to the client. Another impacted area was data quality that has increased close to 100%.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

The vendor organized work using Trello which worked fine with us. All the deadlines were met, we even managed to squeeze in a few extra changes that were requested by the final client

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Personel is approachable. They behave in a professional manner and respond in a timely fashion. The fact that they also work well in a team composed of persons from different countries and from different companies is an added bonus.

Are there any areas for improvement?

It's not necessary a negative aspect but if they could employ more persons they could serve a larger number of clients.