A variety of software solutions exist to automate lease pricing and management processes. Since this industry is highly regulated, leasing software is subject to frequent upgrades and changes. Additionally, there is a huge need for a software product to be flexible enough to accommodate the requirements and processes of multiple lessors.
Some of the major challenges in distributed software development for the leasing industry are discussed below.
Software Customization
The leasing industry today is saturated with software vendors who provide a single line of leasing products to all of their customers. Although in some cases software vendors are creating specialized versions of products for individual customers, this customization can itself become a problem when vendors are forced to maintain multiple software releases and variations for each of their customers. If they choose not to maintain these customized software versions, then their customers are “stuck” with that version and cannot take advantage of any ongoing upgrades that are made to the general product.
Ever Changing Business Requirements
Customers must have a software product that is flexible enough to handle the changing requirements of the market, as well as the growing competition within the overall business environment. One such need is that of internationalization and localization. With the concept of a global enterprise quickly becoming commonplace, there is an enhanced need to internationalize software products. A world‐ready product offers many benefits, including increased revenue, reduced international development costs and lower support costs.
Integration with Other Software or Products
A leasing product almost always needs to integrate with enterprise backend and pricing applications. These integration requirements demand a software product that has been build accordingly from the ground up.
Proposed Solutions
Only a few years ago, lessors faced the choice of building a custom solution or purchasing an “off‐the‐shelf” system, possibly with a few modifications. Custom solutions were more expensive and riskier but had the potential to produce a solution that more exactly matched the company’s operational requirements. “Off‐the‐shelf” solutions were more affordable and proven but required the lessor to accept the limits of the system or pay the vendor to modify the software.
This decision is no longer black or white. Innovative software providers are now creating a “middle ground” by developing systems that use components and flexible configurations. Although these systems are not 100% user‐definable, they are much more flexible than traditional systems and are available at a fraction of the cost of a fully customized solution.
Configurable systems accomplish this flexibility by writing callable components and by using definable screens, report writers and a workflow language to link everything together. Below we discuss how software vendors are delivering customized, adaptable products faster and more cost‐effectively.
Software Product Customization
While the core system remains the same for every customer, the data capture, user interface requirements and processes are manipulated from customer to customer without running into version control issues. Workflow software and Rules Engine are used for customizing the product for different customers. Moreover, a Rules Engine solves the problem of making products flexible enough to handle changes in the customer’s business requirements.
Software Product Integration
Lenders and lessors need a solution that provides end‐to‐end integration for dealer portal, proposal management, business account management, credit management, automatic decision making, contract administration, data acquisition and management, payments collection and several automated functions Software control over processes enables the re‐design of these processes in line with changing business needs. Business processes can be automated in whole or in part using a workflow software and Rules Engine. These tools set procedural rules to pass documents, information or tasks from one resource (human or machine) to another for an action. Moreover, a leasing product that uses XML at its core and performs most functions through web services can be integrated easily with legacy systems in a structured manner. This type of leasing product blends sea
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Meeting the software needs of the leasing industry is no easy task, as every change in legal requirements, market forces and strategy gives rise to a number of challenges.
Finance companies are demanding innovative software products that are ahead of the market, such as solutions that enable users to change their business processes without time or financial constraints. Although these demands are part of a greater paradigm shift in the leasing industry, using workflow and Rules Engine can help software vendors meet some of these needs.
He we discusses how leasing software can be made flexible and adaptable to constantly changing market needs by using workflow and a Rules Engine in conjunction.
Leasing Process
Together, a Rules Engine and workflow can be used to automate the conditional workflow processes of the system, as well as the movement of items between different nodes. This setup can help in managing the life cycle of leasing deals. It can also isolate the bulk of the application code from changes in the life cycle of deals.
Approval Process
The approval process for leasing deals involves approval at various levels. The type and number of levels can vary from time to time and from customer to customer. A combination of Rules Engine and workflow can be used to define the approval process for the deals so that the sequence of approvals can be governed.
Leasing Documents
The importance of tracking documents cannot be undermined in leasing. Required documents for a lease may vary based on entities like vendor, equipment and approval level. In such cases, Rules Engine can be configured and used to specify the required and optional documents for various entities.
Escalation and Notifications
User actions in leasing software might trigger a notification or even lead to an escalation in certain cases. Workflow provides a convenient way of sending notifications to the users based on different actions.
Dynamic User Interface and Authorization
It is typical for applications to have different categories of users and thus a different user interface for each of them. For example, due to security reasons, some information may be hidden from one category of users and available to another. Such dynamic user interfaces can be dynamically configured through rules.
Pricing Calculations
In almost all financial applications (including leasing), it is common that calculations
(e.g., EMI calculations, subsidy calculations, tax calculations, etc.) may be different for different vendors, dealers and locales. Rules provide an easy mechanism to implement
such scenarios.
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Venture specialist Dave Beisel first coined the term “social commerce” to refer to the integration of e‐commerce with social networking. According to PR executive and blogger Steve Rubel, “Social commerce can take several forms, but in sum it means creating places where people can collaborate online, get advice from trusted individuals, find goods and Ideation services and then purchase them. It shrinks the research and purchasing cycle by creating a single destination powered by the power of many.”
Wikipedia describes social commerce (also known as social shopping) as a subset of e‐commerce solution in which the active participation of customers and their personal relationships are at the forefront. The main element of this new trend is customers’ involvement in the marketing of products being sold, e.g. their recommendations and comments through blogs and shopping lists. This phenomenon enables customers to interact with one another in order to make better buying decisions by capturing and structuring “word‐of‐mouth” around product recommendations and reviews.
THE IMPACT OF SOCIAL COMMERCE ON ECOMMERCE
Social Networking sites are a key target for online advertising, as SNS users say peers and colleagues hold more influence over their purchases than any other source of information. Furthermore, Compete, Inc. reports that SNS users spend nearly 25% of their disposable income on online purchases. The recent boom in online advertising has also provided social networking sites a way to convert website traffic into dollars without charging members a subscription fee. The advent of Google's AdWords advertising program has been an especial boon, as it allows sites to place keyword based ads alongside content like users profiles. “Networking sites provide some of the most powerful word‐of‐mouth‐marketing opportunities there have ever been,” says Nancy Costopulos, Chief Marketing Officer at the American Marketing Association. “It's past the fad zone and into the reality zone.”
Another survey by AMA found that 47% of consumers said they would use social networks to discuss and find holiday gift ideas; 29% would buy products through those sites; 51% would look for discounts on social networks; 51% would download coupons; and 18% would read or write product reviews.
According to online marketing firm The ClickZ Network, “‘Brand Advocates’ spread opinions via word of mouth, as well as over social networks, instant messaging, chat, photo sites and blogging. Such advocates have at least a two‐to‐one rate of converting an actual friend or family member to buy the same exact product or brand they support, according to the report.” E‐Consultancy’s Social Commerce Report 2007 found that 67% of online retailers say that a social networking strategy is a medium‐to‐high priority for investment.
A recent study commissioned by social networking giant MySpace reported that business‐to‐consumer messaging could create considerable value when combined with consumer‐to‐consumer messaging. Following up on this study, MySpace recently introduced a hyper targeting program that allows advertisers to pick "enthusiast" audiences from ten categories of interests: music, movies, personal finance, gaming, consumer electronics, sports, travel, auto, fashion and fitness. Similarly, Facebook allows “endorsements” on its site and encourages members to subscribe to brands. Forrester Research observes, “As these ‘Fan‐Sumers’ share their affinities, brands can advertise using trusted social relationships.”
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The processes that enables companies to move data from multiple and disparate sources, reformat and cleanse it, and then load it into either another database, a data mart / data warehouse for analysis, or another operational system to support a business process. This process involves:
Extracting data from outside sources or source operational / archive systems that are the primary source of data for the data warehouse
Transforming the data to fit business needs, which may involve data migration, data cleaning, filtering, validating, reformatting, standardization, aggregation or applying business rules
Loading the data into the end target (i.e., a data warehouse or any other database or application that houses data)
Trends in ETL
Evolving towards generic data integration tools: Not withstanding the fact that ETL tools are specifically aimed at the business intelligence market, they have evolved rapidly over the last few years. According to Gartner, “The stand-alone data integration technology markets — such as extraction, transformation and loading (ETL), replication and federation, and enterprise information integration — will rapidly implode into a single market for multi-mode, multipurpose data integration platforms.” Indeed, if one looks at the top vendors in the market, it is clear that this is happening or has happened already. Informatics has added a real-time module to its distributed software development allowing Informatics to brand Power Center as an EAI tool. IBM has added Data Stage, acquired from Ascential, under the WebSphere family. Oracle has also greatly improved its Warehouse Builder in the 11g version.
Data quality: Another obvious trend in ETL (and data integration in general) is the linkage with data quality tools (both cleansing and profiling). The awareness of the impact of bad quality data on both decision making and operations has risen enormously during the last years. Therefore, most ETL vendors have incorporated data profiling functionality into their tools (thus allowing developers to assess data quality before they develop data transformations), as well as integration with Medical device software development (thus allowing developers to build complex cleansing and standardization features in the transformation process). The above becomes clear when one analyzes the investments or acquisitions that ETL vendors have made over the last years.
Lower latency requirement: In the early stages of their data integration maturity and infrastructure, organizations tend to focus on batch-oriented, high-latency activities, such as nightly population of data warehouses and data extracts for interfacing between developing mobile applications. However, as business pressures require rapid response and reduced cycle times, the demand for lower-latency data integration builds. Although ETL vendors are having a hard time offering true real-time, many offer near real-time functionality.
Market consolidation: Also important to mark is that independent ETL vendors are disappearing. Informatica Power-Center still remains as an independent market leader, but other companies are offering ETL tools as part of a wider gamma of BI tools or as part of the database offering. Indeed, Microsoft, Oracle and IBM all have an ETL offering, with the first two vendors even offering the ETL engine ‘free of charge’ with the database.
Phase out home-built, phase in open source: Quite a few companies have invested during the 80s and the 90s in self-built ETL tools. Mostly these were simple, sometimes metadata-based SQL generators that executed scheduled SQL scripts against the database. In recent years, these tools have been disappearing, first making way for the commercial ETL tools and more recently for the open source ETL market, which has seen quite a few successes with Pentaho Data Integration (previously kettle), Talend and others.
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