Solutions


Overview

Abbro's capabilities mean that Abbro can help organisations meet a number of important business needs, such as: generating core applications, providing a hub integrating existing systems, supporting change management, data cleansing programmes, supporting regulatory requirements and supporting mergers and acquisitions.

Generating core applications

Abbro generates full functionality, normal data processing applications. This is done quickly, simply and reliably by a combination of parameterised specification for screens, reports, etc. and a formal language defining the object based business rules. To date, we have not found any DP functionality that Abbro cannot handle easily, simply and quickly. This is remarkable, as the usual problem with parameterised approaches is their inability to handle real world complexity – either at all or in a usable manner.

While Abbro gives significant benefit in generating free-standing applications using data feeds to/from existing systems, the greatest benefits come from its ability to:

  • Handle changes and enhancements very easily
  • Interface (read, write and modify) with data in existing applications and databases

This gives Abbro an unique ability to ‘fill in the cracks’ between existing systems, providing:

  • Interfaces between systems that cannot easily communicate directly with each other
  • Reporting (real time) across incompatible systems
  • Adding functionality to existing systems
  • Providing functionality and process support in business areas requiring information held in several systems.

Carrying out these tasks often reveals the poor quality and logical incompatibility of the data held in the disparate systems. Abbro has developed processes, rules and techniques for cleansing and integrating this data.



Hub support to integrate and extend existing systems

Because Abbro can access, read, write to and modify data in the major database and software types (Oracle, SAP, MS, etc.), it can be used to integrate a business’s applications by acting as a ‘hub’. This means that Abbro is used to:

  • Provide the interfaces between the systems
  • Provide real time reporting across the data held in those systems (supplemented by data directly created in Abbro)
  • Develop functionality additional to one or more of the existing systems

This can be done step by step (each step giving quantified value), rather than needing a big effort, cost and time delay before benefit is achieved.

A particular example of this ‘hub’ use, is to use Abbro to gradually replace an existing system, replacing and ‘mimicking’ the system’s functionality function by function until all functionality is through Abbro. This can be achieved quite simply by Abbro to, attain different objectives e.g. to achieve Sarbanes-Oxley compliance or as a first stage for major business and system change.

This needs to be combined with the Abbro supported processes of data reconciliation and cleansing.



Supporting change management and BPR with real time system support

Abbro enables organisations to deal with one of the greatest blocks for business changes:

  • The difficulty, cost and above all, time required to make changes to existing systems (singular or multiple) in order to support the intended organisation and set of processes.

Abbro allows process support to be developed in the same time scale as the change management or BPR exercise itself and allows a step by step addition to and modification of systems and hence processes.

This capability revolutionises what businesses can achieve with change management and BPR.



Master Data Management, data cleansing and data integration

Abbro’s ability to simply set up read and write for disparate existing systems, combined with the business rules that can be set up, mean that Abbro can be used to cleanse the data, by:

  • Reporting on the data incompatibilities, within a work flow, to designated people for correction and then allowing those designated people to correct that data in the host systems
  • Making the changes automatically, directly in the host systems, following agreed rules & then reporting on these changes.

This combination of central data definition, data cleansing, work flow to support the cleansing and provision of the corrected data is known as ‘Master Data Management’.

Abbro has a number of major advantages over conventional Master Data Management tools:

  • The data can be directly accessed by Abbro rather than requiring special data feeds
  • Changes can be made directly in the host systems
  • The cleansing can be combined directly with added functionality
  • The process can be taken in small value added chunks without the necessity for massive initial outlay, effort and (above all) delay.

Achieving regulatory and Sarbanes-Oxley compliance

Abbro provides support for Regulatory and Sarbanes-Oxley compliance in 2 fundamental ways:

  • The Abbro generated applications are Sarbanes-Oxley compliant. This means that Abbro can be used to gradually replace an existing non compliant system (eventually only leaving the database, which can be switched over, allowing the original system to be decommissioned)
  • Abbro can be used to add functionality to existing systems, drawing information from those systems, adding additional data and storing it in some combination of the existing systems and Abbro. This means that Regulator requirements for additional information, processes and audit capability can be quickly provided when there are inflexible and incompatible existing systems

Supporting mergers and acquisitions

All of Abbro’s many benefits and capabilities come together in a business merger or acquisition.

Abbro can be used to:

  • Draw together the data from the (usually incompatible) systems
  • Provide reporting across the systems
  • Step by step, investigate and achieve compatible data (customer, product, etc) across the businesses and systems
  • Clean up the data
  • Provide new functionality and process support straddling the businesses/systems in real time (i.e. days and weeks not months)

All of this can be implemented in small changeable steps, achieving real benefit early and often.