Product Centre
Vacancies Banner

Product Centre

The Infomet Product Centre provides pre-developed packaged solutions or parts thereof, to accelerate projects where clients require a quality solution quickly.

Location
The Product Centre is located at our offices in Sandton, in the banking and financial district.

  • Clients can either ‘buy’ our expertise in the form of a set of specifications.
  • Alternatively, they may attend our courses in order to acquire the business system knowledge to help them.
  • Lastly they may acquire modules of our software required for the solution.

Prospective clients may want to visit us to view and discuss these pre-developed solutions and may also want to use the Consulting Centre to help define their needs and requirements. After this it will be possible to launch an accelerated project to customize, extend or alter the existing software base in order to have a solution in a fraction of the normal time.

Solutioning
This initial process can be assisted by domain experts who act as consultants and are facilitated by business and software engineers in order to formalize the requirements as a designed solution in the form of a specification.

The Infomet Product Centre offers a variety of products. Firstly, the products could simply be tools that enables the formation of a solution during the requirements analysis and design phase. It could be the database modules or software modules that actually make up part of the final solution.

In most cases, these products need to be assembled and extended through some form of shortened development process in order to make it operable in the particular environment of the client.

Most of the potential customers will be of the larger type of organizations, requiring a thorough analysis of their own environment which includes the interfaces and security mechanisms, the source of data, and the interaction with their other systems. This work is unavoidable during the implementation phase of a product, so it can be argued that most products are not necessarily complete. Thus it requires customization to a greater or lesser extent.

The prime product is usually some engine consisting of a database portion, an information extraction and presentation mechanism. The database usually has to be sourced directly from the various production systems  of the organization. This core is called the Generic Business Model (GBM), because of it’s ability to represent various types of businesses onto the same generic core. This makes our offerings exceptionally flexible.

Solutions for Industry Sectors
We have extensions to the GBM for various industry sectors, such as

  • Banking and Financial Services
  • Insurance
  • Health and Medical
  • Commerce, Trading and Distribution
  • Manufacturing
  • Transportation
  • Property and Real Estate
  • Education.

Our prime focus at this stage is on the Banking and Financial Services Industry

GBM Modules
The GBM consists of a number of schemas such as

  • SHS – Stakeholder System
  • OFS – Offering System
  • BTS – Business Transactioning System
  • ATS – Asset Transactioning System
  • FTS – Financial Transactioning System
  • IFS – Interfacing System

The schemas can easily be maintained and extended through a specialized set of  Infomet tools:

  • The Infomet Model Editor maintains the design as a set of graphical models.
  • The Infomet Data Modelling Centre  maintains the data definition repository from which we generate the scripts to setup and alter the required database.

It is of course possible to view the data in the GBM database through the use of  specialized front end tools :

  • The GBM Simple Viewer is a simple interrogation tool which allows end-users to build queries related to the entire structure around a deal. Behind the scenes, it does a more full and correct retrieval of all associated data. This is then viewable or printable by the end-users.
  • The GBM GUI Front-end provides an attractive and elegant set of forms used to view the complex data and its relationships.

To use the database we can either configure it in a transactional model  (for commercial transacting) or in a information management manner (for integrated and extensive reporting to the administrators and regulators of the system.

Extraction and Reporting Modules
This will require use to make use of one of various appropriate Extraction and Reporting Systems (ERS), such as

  • Regulatory Reporting for DI Compliance.
  • Regulatory Reporting for Basel Compliance, measurements and risk management.
  • Financial Management Reporting.
  • Tax Reporting.
  • Management Information Dashboards.
  • Shareholder Assurance Reporting.
  • Stakeholder Information Management.

The Business Information Extraction Logic can easily be maintained by means of a set of tools:

  • The Report Definition Tool specifies the content of the output required. (The system will figure out the layout by itself) .
  • An Extraction Logic Editor constructs the pseudo code from identifying the GBM data tables from where the data must be extracted, together with derivation and filtering logic.
  • A Report Rules Editor specifies the derivation, calculation and cross validation of the formatted output.
  • A Report Delivery Definition tool defines the delivery destination, route and mechanism of each output report.

Colloborative Modules
There are modules which can work together with the base GBM modules to provide complete and integrated units for certain functionality:

  • Credit Risk Rating Management
  • Stakeholder Rationalisation (duplicates)
  • Stakeholder Centric Views.

Data Sourcing Modules
In order to populate such Database, there are a set of tools and Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) routines required to source the data into the rationalized GBM.

  • The Data Migration Tool (DaMiT) helps specify and map the Source Data Structure to the Data Structures in the GBM.
  • The ETL’s gets partly generated and partly coded for the specific sourcing system.
  • A High Performance Enterprise Sourcing Platform (HESP) is offered in order to provide sophisticated on-the-fly Sourcing Mechanisms as a black box with:
    • High speed batch loads
    • Real Time Transaction feeds
    • Delta Loading.

Business Repository
Underlying to the GBM, there exists a Standard Operating Environment. This is a repository that defines the business terms and codification; the structures and the templates according to which procedures must be executed, and the data must be populated into the GBM. It can be seen as a business knowledge repository or as some call it, a common business language.

Tools that are needed to populate the SOE are:

  • The SOE Maintenance Front-end.
  • SOE Interrogation Facilities
  • Various SOE Reports.

E-Business Platform Offerings
This software can be used as a full transactioning commercial e-Business Platform. In other words, commercial transactions can be conducted over the internet by suppliers interfacing their production system to the Internet based portal. By registering their offerings on the e-Business Portal together with the transactioning rules, the client  uses the portal to locate offerings based on needs driven search mechanisms, after which comparative quoting mechanisms are invoked for the offerings of the various suppliers. The offerings are:

  • On-Line Supplier Offerings Setup and interfacing Facility.
  • Needs driven Question Engine with all rules to drive the interface.
  • On-Line Customer Offering Search and Ordering  Module (driven by an intelligent Question and Rules Engine).
  • A Procurement and Delivery Administration Module.

Of course these can be supplied as solutions in a box

  • Compliance Solution in a Box
  • E-Business Solution in a Box

For either

  • Itanium
  • IBM p-series.

The Infomet Product Centre can be contacted on
Switch board: (011) 523-9400
Pieter Viljoen Jnr: 083 501 4411
Andre Kasselman: 082 377 5692