A prominent grocery chain offers shopping services and curbside pickup of orders through its website and mobile application.

The grocery chain wanted to provide additional delivery options and partnered with Instacart to offer at-home delivery. 

Internal development teams were fully allocated to other key initiatives and unable to complete the integration in a timely manner.   They needed a trusted partner to complete the task.

• Engage an external team focused on Instacart Integration as its primary task.
• Concept to delivery in under eight months.
• Provide architecture, API specifications, development, and testing of the Instacart solution.
• Process thousands of orders daily.

Strategic Data System’s played a significant role in developing the online shopping application that is core to the grocer’s curbside delivery. When the grocer wanted to expand its options to include home delivery, the grocer partnered with Instacart to shop and deliver groceries to the customers’ homes.

The grocer’s IT resources were engaged in other key initiatives, and they struggled to get the necessary traction to integrate Instacart in the desired timeframe. They exclusively engaged Strategic Data Systems to produce a solution.

Strategic Data Systems sent a small team of senior developers who had experience with the online shopping application to San Francisco to meet with the Instacart architects. The SDS developers architected a solution that satisfied the needs of both partners.

Over the next eight months, Strategic Data Systems delivered the architecture, APIs, code, integration testing, documentation, and support in the successful integration of Instacart with the grocer’s internal system. The grocer now processes more than 35,000 Instacart orders per day and is fully integrated with Instacart.

Take an idea and existing data sources and build a robust, easy-to-navigate, revenue-generating tool to provide customers the ability to perform up-to-date research of companies, industries, or executives with online searches.

Develop an online product that aggregates multiple data sources for electronic search.

The data sources contain millions of companies and executive profiles across the globe.  The data was aggregated from 40,000 news, business, and public data sources.  The goal is to store that data in searchable format, and keep it up-to-date with an easy and intuitive search interface.

The development team worked closely with the product development team to build a brand new, revenue generating online system. This new system would dynamically and automatically load and update large amounts of data on companies, industries and people. The system would fabricate and stage the data for search and retrieval by the front end application.

Data was stored in a large complex database. The fabrication system would receive large files of data. That data would determine what data was relevant, extract it and tag it with meta data. The attributes would be stored for research and retrieval; maintaining relationships between thousands of attributes of data. The system was built to have a staging database and update the online repository for fast search and retrieval.

The system allows users to generate reports with a streamlined table of contents comprised of direct links to company overviews; news articles about target companies; details on parent companies and subsidiaries; financial, competitive, and stock information; information on recent mergers and acquisitions; legal information; domestic and foreign patents and more. It also allows access to financial overviews of companies, worldwide. 

A substantial increase in the participation of the client’s bi-weekly loan program resulted in the client having to automate many portions of his business process, including customer service systems, self-service systems, payment processing, and sales systems. 

Provide a complete solution that automated the customers entire business process, starting with sales, loan payment processing, customer service, and compliance reporting for local and federal governments.

Strategic Data Systems took over from an underperforming vendor to stabilize existing systems, and then took the lead to develop new systems that underpinned all facets of the company business.   This multi-year effort encompassed many different solutions including:

• Rebuilding the core engine that calculated biweekly payments and schedules surrounding those payments
• Software that managed multiple trust accounts allowing transfer of funds among those accounts as required.
• Integration with accounting systems.
• Customer self-service portal.
• Customer service desktop software that allowed agents to interact with customers.
• Compliance reporting for various state and local governments.
• Manage marketing campaigns and letter generation for customer aquisition.

As a result, the customer was able to handle a much larger volume of customers using the same headcount, and was able to diversify risks among bank trust counts, and allow the customers to self-serve their needs.

Calibration of industrial equipment is key to producing products that meet a tolerance standard.   Calibrated equipment came with a certificate that specified the tolerances to which a device was calibrated.   These certificates had to be manually managed, and it was a challenge to determine when recertification was necessary

Calibration of your production equipment is important to all manufacturing facilities.  Until recently, each calibrated device was delivered with a paper certificate that needed to be managed in an organized way to keep tolerances of your manufactured products in spec.

The calibration company was looking for a competitive edge by giving its customers an electronic way to manage calibration certificates, and at the same time, remind customers when it was time to recalibrate their devices.

Strategic Data Systems worked with this client to build a cloud-based certificate management system.  Devices were tagged, and the tag could be used to electronically download the certification history of the device.   Additionally, the customer would be notified when it was time to re-certify a device in order to remain compliant.

This resulted in improved customer satisfaction, as it solved a major issue of managing paper certificates.   The customer could now access certification data from anywhere, and did not have to rely on paper files at the office.   The customer also knows when the device needs to be re-certified resulting in more predictability in forecasting for the certificate company.

The existing systems of paper workflow prevented further growth of the company, keeping lead times lengthy (only one work center at a time could work on jobs), resulting in lost orders from time to time and making it impossible to know the status of any given job.  In addition, capacity management was not possible because the salespeople had no visibility into the amount of work in the shop and the manufacturing team could not see all the orders at one time.

Automate a paper-based, shop-floor workflow to allow the company increase throughput without the addition of labor or equipment.

The company approached SDS with a seemingly well thought out overview of what the system needed to do.  The existing systems of paper prevented further growth of the company, keeping lead times lengthy (only one work center at a time could work on jobs), resulting in lost orders from time to time and making it impossible to know the status of any given job.  In addition, capacity management was not possible because the salespeople had no visibility of the amount of work in the shop and the manufacturing team could not see all the orders at one time.

When SDS signed on to custom develop the “Shop Floor System” their initial step was to assemble a cross-functional group of users and work through a process to gather all the necessary requirements.  Once requirements were agreed upon, the team developed a project path.  SDS began designing the layout of screens and describing how the system would work.  As they progressed through this process, there were frequent updates discussions and modifications with the original requirements team.  When the final product was released to production, not only were there no surprises to the users, but the system had been thoroughly tested so the system operated as expected from day one.

Upon implementation, the “Shop Floor System” enabled the inside sales desk to see current loading at each discrete work center in the plant.  Since they could see the expected completion dates for every order, it was possible at the time of order acceptance to notify the customer of a realistic expected-ship date (on-time delivery jumped from 30-40% up to near 85% ).  Lead times for items dropped from 4-5 days to 2-3 days due to the ability to start multiple items concurrently (Shop Floor could schedule individual parts, not just overall order).  Each item to be produced was now color-coded.  The majority of parts, which required ‘normal’ tolerances and had no special handling were white.  IF there were other requirements for the parts, they would show up in various colors, all indicating to the production personnel that they needed to look for further instructions.  All instructions were included in the system, so with a simple click or two on the touch screens located at each machine, they would know exactly what to do.

An unexpected and originally unplanned benefit of the system turned out to be a significant quality enhancement.  With the paper system, the operators had to do the math to calculate the exact size to cut or mill parts to be within the customers’ ordered size/tolerance.  The Shop Floor system was coded to perform that calculation for the operator which eliminated a common source of rejected product.  In addition, the system was able to electronically feed the CMM (Coordinate Measuring Machine) and Laser measurement system so that final inspection could be performed and compared automatically to the customer order.

Once parts were completed, they changed color again and were moved electronically to shipping.  Once all parts for the order were complete, shipping was notified that the order was ready to chip complete.  The capability was added so that if a partial shipment was requested, shipping could easily locate the completed parts and ship said partial.

The ultimate benefits of the system were, reduced Lead times (nearly 50% reduction).  Improved On-Time completion (100% improvement).  Improved communication with customer (up front ship dates and real time status of orders).  Quality improved from an average of 18-20 complaints per month to 2-3.  The company was finally able to break through the previous volume barrier and went from being a $15M company in 2016 to a ~$25M company in 2019.  This would have not been possible with the paper system.

In addition to the Shop Floor, it was identified that the inventory management system which had been written by the corporate IT group was severely lacking in accuracy and functionality.  SDS rewrote the inventory system with the ability to integrate with Shop Floor and legacy order management (quoting, purchasing, order fulfillment) system.