HVL - Host Validation System

The Opportunity

A large FMCG has various applications to manage its various business models. Hence, there was a need felt to have a common and unique point to validate and process the data that is coming from these various system viz. Hand Held application catering to Door to sales model, Order Management system catering to the Organized Trade model, ADA (Autonomous & Distributors Administration) catering to large distributors etc. An integrated system was envisaged, which would take the data from these various systems, validate them, provide a mechanism for correcting the documents and then preparing data files that could be used by the billing, commissions, sales data warehouse applications.

Our Approach

• Provide a robust application with an open design to cater to future needs (e.g. through parameterization) and would be a combination of batch and on-line system
• Provide an integrated system to process Sales and Inventory Data coming from various Go To Market systems like HHC (Hand Held Application), OMS (Order Management System), ADA (Autonomous Distributors Administration), Tropicana Sales, S & J
• Build integrity checks to validate data and documents against Master Files, and re-compute totals, to ensure their accuracy.
• Provide a means to correct documents failing the validation, edit and re-introduce corrected documents into the validation process.
• Identify voided, duplicated and potentially missing documents.
• Provide a means to input documents using on-line screens.
• Consolidate data coming from different selling systems and provide data files to the rest of back-office systems viz. BILLING, COMMISIONS system, GSA (Global Sales Accounting System), SDW (Sales Data Warehouse system).

Our Solution

• As the system is back-end heavy, many components have been developed in PL/SQL. All the user interfaces have been done using PSP.
• The middleware used would be Oracle9i Application Server , database in Oracle 9i and the operating system would be Unix / Linux
• All the night batch processes would be done using shell scripts with a target daily cycle time of one hour.
• The back-end components would be done using new features of Oracle9i like External Tables, Analytical Functions, BULK and Advance features of PL/SQL.
• Code written would be tested for optimization to minimize any performance problem.

Business Benefits

• Single integrated system taking data from various systems and providing data to various systems
• Parameterized application which can handle multiple regions (Country Company)
• New regions can get implemented with minimum changes due to open design