Solution Synopsis :: Enablers for Business

The following are selections of bespoke solutions conceptualized, designed and developed by Symmetry. This synopsis summarizes solution highlights and salient information. Detailed case studies with solution details are available on request.

Product Feed Generation

Symmetry’s Product Feed Generator was designed and developed to enable clients to configure and automatically generate product feeds in multiple formats from any RDBMS database. The tool enables etailers and eCommerce stores to automatically supply up-to-date product and pricing information to search engines, shopping channels and comparison sites such as Yahoo, Amazon, MSN, Froogle, Shopping.Com, thefind.com, Become, Builders Square et cetera. Symmetry’s product feed tool allows shop owners to quickly configure product data and map information to formats, schedule feeds, and upload feeds to FTP sites. Feeds can be generated as CSV and XML.

Content Management Tool

Symmetry has developed a web-based, website Content Management Tool for a leading company in the government sector. The tool’s standard features enable business users to define multi-level menus, create and publish rich content, establish links to related topics, associate banners with specific pages and publish press releases. Optional features include changing of themes and templates, localization and plug-ins for forums and blogs. This tool was designed and delivered to meet the client’s short deadline of on month.

The tool has been developed on the .NET framework.

Stock Transfer and Tracking

A regional retail chain for specialty products, the client had a centralized warehousing and distribution system. The mid-tier ERP system used by the client did not offer extensive functionality for distribution. Symmetry built a stock transfer and tracking system with features for raising stock transfer requests, multi-part shipments, shipment tracking, recording physical receipts and alerts for discrepancies. The application interacts with the client’s ERP to extract item and stock area information and updates stock status with each movement.

Vendor Payment Processing

The client, a large online retailer of lighting solutions, procured lighting products directly from manufacturers. The client’s vendors offered payment options of check, credit card and wire. While the client was allowed payment terms of 30 days, the client wished to leverage on the free credit period allowed by the credit card company by paying vendors through the corporate credit card. However, payment by credit card required the accountant to manually prepare an authorization sheet for each vendor accompanied by a list of invoices to be applied by the payment. These authorizations were converted to PDF and subsequently emailed to the vendors. This manual process was not only time-consuming; it also had to be repeated weekly. The process was also error-prone and subject to mismatches between the payments accounted and the actual authorizations. Symmetry created a payment processing utility to automate this process. The utility connects to the database of the client’s accounting system to identify authorizations required to be generated. The authorization template is saved as a Microsoft Word document template file and can be modified by the client’s accountant. The utility generates the authorization for each vendor with the list of invoices to be applied and credits to be applied. Authorization sheets are converted to PDF and emailed to the vendor’s billing email ID.