software integration
by software integration I mean a bundle of one or more pieces of software designed to work together in the context of a larger system to allow communications between incompatible systems, or to apply tailored business rules to business processes and so on.
A good bit of my experience comes from these type of projects, which are often the most challenging. Here you can find some of the major projects of this type that I have worked on.
back office integrated solutions :: for large oil distribution/retail company
This is one of the largest projects I have worked on. The project consisted on a series of software layers to integrate various parts of the production side of the business with the Accounting side of it.
This company operates a number of petrol stations, SPAR shops and a pretty big delivery truck fleet.
Each part of the business is running on specific software that does not communicate with each other.
In collaboration with Envisage Cloud accounting technicians, I designed a small suite of software for this client:
CODAS Link
Handles data from the CODAS system (Oil management system) and provides cash book functionality for Oil Depot managers. Data is then manipulated and processed in Sage 200.
Connections Hub
Allows the staff to handle retail prices for the Retail part of the business in a single place. Prices and promotions are then propagated to all their convenience stores and gas stations.
Connections
This is a piece of software I designed (with Envisage Cloud) for the Retail Industry. The company has a customised version which integrates with Connections Hub. This software also provides cash book functionality for the convenience store managers.
Various Sage 200 Integrations
In addition I designed a couple of integrations for Sage 200 to handle leases for their truck fleet, stock transfers between depots and other accounting related tasks.
back office integrated solutions :: for large gift-voucher provider company
This project consisted of building a framewrok to process gift-voucher redemption transactions in multiple currencies (EUR/GBP), coming from different sources and with different formats and different accounting logic.
The framework needed to be flexible in order to cater for new type of Gift Cards or Vouchers and related formats and accounting logic.
The various layers of the integration gather the transactions (Data Transformation Layer), manipulate and validate data (Business Rules Layer) and integrate with Sage 200 Accounting software to automatically post transactions.
electronic payment software :: for Sage 50 and Sage 200
this project's aim was to create a middle layer software, in partnership with a large on-line money transfer broker, between the world-wide payment transfer service APIs and any potential accounting package.
To achieve this, after researching other accounting software available in different markets around the globe, I designed a number of interfaces to deal with accounting business rules and transaction posting methods in order to define a standard to exchange information between the software I designed and the accounting package of choice.
The framework would then allow, with minimal coding effort, to build small components related to specific accounting software. Such components then communicate with the software via interfaces and recevie and send information in a given format. The component therefore includes only code to read/write transactions using whatever technology required. The framework was also built in order to handle automatic updates of any of its components in case of security patches on bug fixes.
The application communicates with the on-line services of the world-wide money transfer broker to read/write transactions. All comunications are secured (SSL) and with double encryption.
The system is targeted at corporations with numerous foreign suppliers, dealing with multiple currencies and exchange rates. The initial release of this software is compatible with Sage 200 and Sage 50.
This project was very interesting and enriching from a secuirty related point of view and it gave me important insights into electronic multi-currency payments.
