Portfolio Skills

Delve into our background: Browse through a selection of our projects based on our skills and see some of the innovative software, applications and web services we have created for and with our clients. We develop for many platforms and work with Windows, UNIX, Linux and OS X servers.

PwC – Pulse, Profiled Business News

PwC – Pulse, Profiled Business News

PwC Global Services

Pulse – Profiled Business News

PwC – Pulse: Profiled Business News

PwC is an international accounting and consultancy company, providing high quality tax, assurance and advisory services. Their consultants therefore rely on direct access to up-to-date, reliable and relevant business news.

Prior to the arrival of Pulse, PwC Nederland employed six information specialists. Their task was to keep consultants up-to-date with the latest business developments. Firstly the specialists gathered news from various premium sources, such as Factiva, Lexis Nexis, and Gartner. They then combined the information, producing about 60 weekly newsletters. Each one focused on specific lines of business. This approach was obviously time-consuming. What is more, 60 newsletters could not cover every line of business. Which meant PwC consultants often resorted to Google, spending 26% of their time searching for information online. An inefficient method that produced results of doubtful quality.

PwC was convinced they could address this issue more effectively. Therefore they approached BSL. We have experience with knowledge management solutions, business intelligence and search. As a result our developers came back with a custom-made news-alert system. Called Pulse, our software delivers profiled news alerts to thousands of consultants within PwC.

Pulse: Smart Business News

“In order to introduce Pulse as a global service, we have worked with many different teams, each with their own technical and functional requirements. These wishes all had to be supported, making my work on this project both challenging and varied.”

Peter

Java/Sr. Software engineer, Bright Side of Life

Pulse Smart Business News

Business Intelligence, a custom solution

BSL designed and developed Pulse using Oracle ™ and Exalead technology. It imports around 80,000 new articles each day from global news services (Bloomberg, Factiva, Forrester, Gartner, Lexis Nexis, ISI…). It also imports local news sources, along with RSS feeds, selected website contents, and Twitter. Pulse imports articles from over 10,000 sources, updating the Pulse database in real-time. But Pulse isn’t just a database. It also classifies, indexes and maintains profiled news feeds for PwC employees.

Just four information specialists now manage over 1,000 profiled business news feeds in the Netherlands. PWC consultants subscribe to these feeds via the company’s website. But also via email and smartphones. And our technology ensures that every feed provides reliable, high quality content. Which means PwC consultants are at the top of their game when they meet their clients.

PwC first rolled out Pulse in the Netherlands, but its success has led to international growth. It’s now used in more than 20 countries. With over 10,000 users, and more than 30,000 subscriptions to news feeds. Most noteworthy is that over 92% of users would recommend Pulse to their colleagues! And PwC management teams are also equally enthusiastic. In PwC Germany the cost of briefing consultants decreased by 95%. Their consultants save time, they’re well-briefed, and they can focus on clients – not on Google searches. This success has been rewarded. Pulse has won two prestigious business awards.

Business Intelligence, a custom solution

BSL designed and developed Pulse using Oracle ™ and Exalead technology. It imports around 80,000 new articles each day from global news services (Bloomberg, Factiva, Forrester, Gartner, Lexis Nexis, ISI…). It also imports local news sources, along with RSS feeds, selected website contents, and Twitter. Pulse imports articles from over 10,000 sources, updating the Pulse database in real-time. But Pulse isn’t just a database. It also classifies, indexes and maintains profiled news feeds for PwC employees.

Just four information specialists now manage over 1,000 profiled business news feeds in the Netherlands. PWC consultants subscribe to these feeds via the company’s website. But also via email and smartphones. And our technology ensures that every feed provides reliable, high quality content. So PwC consultants are at the top of their game when they meet their clients.

PwC first rolled out Pulse in the Netherlands, but its success led to international growth. It’s now used in more than 20 countries. With over 10,000 users, and more than 30,000 subscriptions to news feeds. Most noteworthy is that over 92% of users would recommend Pulse to their colleagues! And PwC management teams are also equally enthusiastic. In PwC Germany the cost of briefing consultants decreased by 95%. Their consultants save time, they’re well-briefed, and they can focus on clients – not on Google searches. This success has been rewarded. Pulse has won two prestigious business awards.

Pulse Smart Business News

“As we all know, time is precious. I’m using Pulse on a daily basis, because it saves me so much time. It is easy to scan the news and then drill down to the full article if necessary. I have subscribed to several feeds that keep me up to date with all the news which is related to my Clients and the Industry.”

Sr. Consultant, PwC

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Search expertise

BSL has expertise with many search and business intelligence technologies, including Autonomy, Exalead, Oracle Text, Elastic Search and Sybase FTS. The full contents of documents can be indexed. We use language intelligence and semantic search techniques to recognize words, sentences, concepts and synonyms. These technologies ensure that we can find and select the most relevant information, even from millions of documents.

Award winning software

Pulse has won two important international MPF business awards. In 2008, the Best Use of Technology Award. And also the Best Collaboration Across International Borders award in 2013. The jury of the MPF award ceremony praised the simple way in which the ‘knowledge and management platform’ enables efficient collaboration between international teams.

Innovation and experience

Although Pulse started as a Dutch project, it has become a worldwide success within PwC. It was recently upgraded to a global service. Which goes to show that no bridge is too far for BSL to find suitable solutions for challenging projects.

This is a great example of BSL creating a custom solution designed specifically for a single client. And it’s grown to become a global solution! If you’ve got ideas for your own web applications or service, then why not get in touch – no strings attached!

Martyn Simpson

Director, Bright Side of Life

ABN AMRO SRS – Signature Registration System

ABN AMRO SRS – Signature Registration System

ABN AMRO

Signature Registration System

ABN AMRO SRS – Signature Registration System

ABN AMRO is a large international bank with branches in more than 60 countries. They provide a wide range of services to individual payment account holders, small businesses and multinationals.

Important decisions within ABN AMRO are often confirmed utilising a Power of Attorney (PoA) assigned to individual employees. A PoA defines the authority of each individual, effectively defining which transactions fall under their management. ABN AMRO asked BSL to design a system that uses signature verification to efficiently and safely improve this process. Working closely with the Power of Attorney team within the bank, our developers came up with a customised solution: Signature Registration System (SRS). Since its introduction, SRS has been a great success.

ABN AMRO Signature Registration System
ABN AMRO Signature Registration System

Powers of Attorney

BSL developed SRS to manage signatures and Powers of Attorney within the bank. ABN AMRO employees use SRS throughout the world to verify transactions. There is a continued need to introduce new technologies and improvements to meet the demands of the bank. So we’ve regularly extended and improved the application since ABN AMRO commissioned the design and development of SRS in 1998. As a result, it still meets the latest requirements and is a still crucial resource within the bank.

The development of SRS was a challenging project back in 1998. Of course, over the years, we have introduced many changes. SRS now carries out many administrative tasks entirely automatically, significantly reducing the amount of data entry. We’ve also ported the application from Windows to Web applications. We had to meet the strict requirements and guidelines applied within ABN AMRO when designing the software. In 2016, we migrated the system to a private cloud. And in 2020, we migrated the system to an entirely new cloud infrastructure, whilst also updating the security, and interfaces to other applications and databases within the bank.

 

Powers of Attorney

BSL developed SRS to manage signatures and Powers of Attorney within the bank. ABN AMRO employees use SRS throughout the world to verify transactions. There is a continued need to introduce new technologies and improvements to meet the demands of the bank. So we’ve regularly extended and improved the application since ABN AMRO commissioned the design and development of SRS in 1998. As a result, it still meets the latest requirements and is a still crucial resource within the bank.

The development of SRS was a challenging project back in 1998. Of course, over the years, we have introduced many changes. SRS now carries out many administrative tasks entirely automatically, significantly reducing the amount of data entry. We’ve also ported the application from Windows to Web applications. We had to meet the strict requirements and guidelines applied within ABN AMRO when designing the software. In 2016, we migrated the system to a private cloud. And in 2020, we migrated the system to an entirely new cloud infrastructure, whilst also updating the security, and interfaces to other applications and databases within the bank.

ABN AMRO Signature Registration System

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Keeping up with change

We design our software so it can evolve with the changing wishes of our customers and the market. The SRS system is an excellent example of this strategy. ABN AMRO has successfully used SRS for many years, through many technical changes. This long-term success is largely due to the ability of our developers to respond quickly to the changing wishes of the bank. In close cooperation with ABN AMRO, we designed and developed a completely new SRS web application in 2013.

Safe and secure applications

We develop safe and reliable systems. During the SRS project, we introduced comprehensive security measures. So protecting the database contents and ensuring the integrity of data. As a result, the authority and functions available to users can be strictly controlled.

Database expertise

We have many years of experience in delivering multimedia database solutions. The flexibility of our modular approach means that we can integrate our solutions with your current infrastructure. And thanks to the BSL developed software and the applied database technology, SRS is fast, secure, reliable and easy to use.

“It has been an interesting challenge over past years to improve the working process and make it more efficient. We achieved this by looking critically at this process together with the client. As a result, we were able to translate requirements and goals into perfectly-fitting solutions.”

Eric

Software Architect , Bright Side of Life

NBD Biblion – AIDA Multimedia Order System

NBD Biblion – AIDA Multimedia Order System

NBD Biblion

AIDA Online Order System

NBD Biblion – AIDA Online Order System

NBD Biblion offers products, services and expertise in the field of Dutch language media titles. Notably reviewing almost every book and multimedia title (DVD, Blu-rays etc.) published in the Netherlands. They are therefore one of the largest suppliers of information and purchasing advice to public libraries and (school) media centers. One NBD Biblion service is the ordering system AIDA: their Acquisition and Information DAtabase.

AIDA website users frequently need to search and order hundreds of titles (books and multimedia) every week. With this in mind, NBD Biblion therefore provides many details for each title. For example, the purchase price, book cover, format, page count, and blurb/summary. They also need a number of unique search and order features.

Search

First of all, users can quickly and easily search for titles, just by filling in words in a simple search field. Maybe best described as a ‘Google-like’ method. If this yields too many results, we also provide more refined methods. So users can search for a specific title, author or ISBN/EAN number. AIDA adds selected titles to an order basket. The system then orders these titles in a batch.

Batches

Moreover, users don’t even need to search. Because they can just upload an order list they have created. AIDA then selects and orders all of the requested titles automatically. Because there can be hundreds of orders, AIDA provides a complete order history for users. While NBD Biblion originally developed AIDA themselves, they realized that they needed improvements. They turned to BSL, who were asked to rebuild the system completely. Not only the web interface, but also the underlying database interfaces. A challenge which we grasped with both hands.

NBD Biblion AIDA - Multimedia Order System
NBD Biblion AIDA - Multimedia Order System

Completely new user-friendly AIDA

BSL designed and realized a new front-end for the AIDA ordering system. Firstly we designed it to match the NBD Biblion house style. So users encounter a familiar look & feel. In addition we introduced various technical changes. These include using Drupal, combining a new MySQL database with integrated links to the underlying Oracle title database.

As a result we created a completely new user-friendly AIDA. Where information is clearly presented to end-users. A site that is compatible with a range of popular browsers. Moreover, by using a Drupal CMS, NBD Biblion content managers can now quickly and easily add offers, promotional material and messages to their ‘shop window’. Authorized users can even change the site layout using the CMS.  AIDA is linked to the NBD Biblion back-end Oracle systems, so users can access the full catalog of titles. Including bibliographic content and current price information. Customer orders can be placed using the new website interfaces. And then processed directly via the back-end.

 

NBD Biblion AIDA - Multimedia Order System

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Drupal, a flexible CMS

Drupal is a flexible CMS, used by small companies, multinationals and all sizes in-between! First of all it allows customers to easily maintain their own website contents. In addition, a Drupal website can be hosted anywhere so is easy to manage. And our developers can use Drupal to create complex websites in just a few weeks.

Databank expertise

Thanks to our years of experience with (multimedia) database solutions and the flexibility of our modular approach, we can integrate our solutions with your current infrastructure. In this case we linked AIDA to the back-end Oracle-systems used by NBD Biblion.

Long-term support

When a software product has gone into production, users often need support and maintenance for the longer term. That is why we offer our customers a range of flexible support services. NBD Biblion has a maintenance agreement with BSL. This keeps the site up and running and secure – 7 days a week.

“There were many technical challenges during the design and realization of a good interface for the AIDA order system. Drupal was chosen for the web interface. We then had to integrate this front-end with existing back-end API services based on Oracle. A challenge that we were able to meet.”

Eric

Software Architect, Bright Side of Life

ABN AMRO SRS Brochure

ABN AMRO SRS Brochure

ABN AMRO SRS Brochure

ABN AMRO SRS

We developed the Signature Registration System (SRS) on behalf of the ABN AMRO bank. A worldwide organization that authorizes many hundreds of financial transactions each day. SRS manages and verifies the signatures and authorizations (Powers of Attorney or POAs) of employees located throughout the world. Along with the POAs, SRS manages personnel information and digital signatures, and provides the local Chambers of Commerce with the information they require. SRS is a web application using a central Oracle database. This makes it fast, reliable and easy-to-use. SRS meets the strict requirements and security guidelines that apply to all banking services. It is also integrated with the existing SAP HR system, so that personnel information does not need to be (re)entered or maintained manually. (more…)

CRV Multimedia DB Brochure

CRV Multimedia DB Brochure

CRV Multimedia DB Brochure

CRV Multimedia DB

CRV maintains a comprehensive database of herd records including many photos. The Bright Side of Life (BSL) was therefore asked to develop the Digital Photo Archive (DPA), an image database. Based on BSL’s standard Asset Management software (FRS), the DPA is now a multimedia DB (MMB), a unique database containing thousands of dairy and breeding stock images, as well as hundreds of videos…

(more…)

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