Let’s talk!

Please take a moment to share your details. We will get in touch with you shortly.


Tag: Tech story

Top 5 Reasons Your Business Needs a Mobile App

Posted on by Ces_creative

A whopping 83% of people worldwide own a smartphone, and 88% of their mobile usage is on mobile applications. Global mobile app revenues are expected to be more than $935 billion in 2023, with no signs of slowing down in the foreseeable future.

Undoubtedly, the mobile app market has witnessed accelerated growth and income over the years. Mobility is the new landscape of communication with customers and is a real extension of any organisation’s brand.

As a result, organisations now understand how vital it is to use mobile channels for effective customer engagement and for running their businesses efficiently.     

Nearly 48% of small and mid-sized businesses also use a mobile application to support their business. There are numerous reasons an app can be your ‘Knight in Shining Armour’ if you are a small to midsize company. Let us enumerate the top 5 on the list:

1. Scale & Compete

Every enterprise strives to scale their business, retain existing customers, and onboard new customers. A mobile app has tremendous potential to reach out to new horizons. It can be used as one of the trusted tools to explore new markets and to scale up existing business. A simple and conducive user experience can make a huge difference in adding new customers and retaining them. A mobile app can help to –

  1. Acquire untapped customers
  2. Explore new geographical markets
  3. Introduce & promote new products at a lower cost & faster time-to-market
  4. Improve brand awareness

2. Payment Options

A business mobile app will open up multiple payment options to your customers. Customers across the globe are well versed with mobile app payments. Mobile payments can –

  1. Save time to authenticate and make a payment
  2. Save processing fee on card payments
  3. Help in transparent bookkeeping
  4. Enable easy recurring payments

3. Digitize Paperwork

An app can become a platform to share and store necessary paperwork to streamline approvals and electronic authorisations, thereby improving customers’ experience. A mobile app with built-in capabilities like camera, virtual identification, e-sign, biometrics will make this whole process easier. Mobile app will – 

  1. Drastically reduce total processing time of applications, clearances, disbursements
  2. Digitize Invoices, purchase orders, license agreements & other contracts                                       
  3. Allow organised data to be consumed or to distribute without manual errors
  4. Reduce manual operational & logistical cost

4. Know Your Customers Better

An app provides rich insights about your customers – demographics, in-app behaviour, location. These customer insights can be leveraged towards –

  1. Developing new products and new channels 
  2. Understanding Products & Services Adoption
  3. Planning an Effective Sales & Marketing Campaign
  4. Optimizing the Marketing Budget & Improving Conversions
  5. Personalising Communication with your customers

5. Improve Operational Efficiency 

Operational efficiency is a critical part of any business, especially in the domain of Supply Chain Control. An app to streamline internal operations can –

  1. Automate & expedite the supply chain process
  2. Enable real-time operations tracking
  3. Seamless communication across the supply chain
  4. Alerts & notifications for administrative decisions & warehouse management

Plan a Mobile Application Suitable to your Business

By the end of this read, we hope you can relate the benefits with respect to your business needs, but a whole lot of questions might have arisen in your mind. 

Some of the basic questions you can ask yourself, while planning for an app –

  1. Can a mobile app add value to my business?
  2. What features and functions does my mobile app need?
  3. How much will it cost to design and develop an app? 
  4. Should I need an in-house development team or should I partner with a vendor to build it? 
  5. How do I plan the Go-to-Market Strategy?

To simplify things, we suggest you consult experts in the industry, who have a proven record to analyse and to recommend the right strategy for mobile applications. You may also get in touch with mobile application development experts from CES IT Pvt Ltd, who can assist you with the right strategy to assess and to implement mobile applications. 

Approaching Deadline: Upgrading Oracle Application Could be (almost) as Easy as Pushing a Button

Posted on by Ces_creative

How CES is helping customers avoid application version obsolescence and mitigate Oracle Corporation’s fast approaching EBS de-support deadline

Time is ticking for Oracle version 12.1.3

Oracle EBS customers are aware that version 12.1.3 of Oracle Business Suite will be de-supported by Oracle soon. With December 2021 as the deadline, they barely have a year left.  IT teams will have to be prepared to solve any functional or technical issue on their own, post the de-support date.

Once the extended support is off the menu, upgrading EBS could become difficult.  EBS customers will get the security updates but upgrading EBS could be a challenge due to prerequisite patches and specific upgrade issues related to EBS configuration. Customers may have to run business processes with blunt tools and outdated features. Suitable vendors who upgrade the application may not be available anymore due to lowered business volume. Moreover, upgrading can become expensive as resources move on to newer versions and cloud.

” Customers may have to run business processes with blunt tools and outdated features. “

Harvest the benefits of upgrading

By upgrading, the business will reap many benefits of the newer versions. First, the EBS customer will avoid application obsolescence and check off the box for the next 10 years before the next deadline-driven upgrade has to be done. Second, the customer will be in sync with the latest version, and get plenty of out-of-the box features that Oracle has added to each incremental version over the past decade. These new features can help develop new business use cases like – offline data manipulation and update, uploading of data files as attachments, one-step checkout in procurement, and the list goes on. Adding to the above business will also have the advantage of technical architectural changes – the possibility of online patching which reduces the need for patching downtime. Furthermore, customers will have access to updated reports and dashboards through Enterprise Command Center.

CES makes upgrading to version 12.2.10 easy

If a business has not upgraded EBS to a new version for a decade, they have no choice but to upgrade.  CES is right here to help in successfully upgrading EBS to R12.2.10 version. Our highly skilled team has the expertise of completing 10 plus upgrades for various customers. We follow a well-defined methodology right from planning to post-upgrade support and knowledge transfer.

CES analyses the customers’ current version and the processes they follow and maps a clear path to make the transition easy. Our methods are non-intrusive meaning everything can be done remotely/offshore with very little support needed from the business. All this can be completed in a span as short as 4 months at a highly affordable fixed cost.

” By upgrading the EBS customer will get plenty of out-of-the box features that Oracle has added to each incremental version over the past decade. “

Now is the right time – don’t let it slip away

With less than a year’s time to act, it is high-time that you de-risk your business. Take advantage of the most affordable and straightforward upgrade solution and stay worry-free for the next 10 years. For more information or a conversation on how CES can make the entire upgrade easy and affordable, please contact us at sales@cesltd.com.

A Mobile App for Bridging the Social Distance with Digital Life Stories

Posted on by Ces_creative

New ways of connecting human: Guided video creation and storytelling on a mobile phone

Nature vs culture

Man is a social animal that lives in a society with friends and family.  In nature, the animal world also lives in their own societies – herds and packs – but that world is different from the human society.  The animal world is governed by the law of survival of the fittest.  Whereas, in the human society the mighty takes care of the meek.  We, as a society, are wired to take care of people with special needs and those in vulnerable age group.

Pandemic and the vulnerable

When the Corona pandemic hit the world earlier this year, it seemed Charles Darwin’s theory of “Survival of the Fittest” might apply to the human society as well.  Governments around the world took swift action and locked down the economy.  They urged and even mandated people to severely restrict their movement.  With remote working and travel restrictions, the communities for senior living particularly got isolated.  While the physical isolation was aimed at reducing the risk of health hazard for the seniors, they getting distanced from their children, grandchildren and other relatives was emotionally challenging for them.  The relatives were also concerned about the well-being of their seniors.  As in remote working, zoom or other video conferencing tool was an available option for people to connect and handle their social responsibilities.  But this option was only slightly better than a having a conversation over phone.  It needed both parties to have time for each other at a common schedule.  A better and easier solution was needed for this problem.

“We, as a society, are wired to take care of people with special needs and those in vulnerable age group.”

Technology giveth hope

This is when the human society rises to the occasion and does something different – and so did one of software companies in the US with the help of CES.   When the distancing happened in physical contact, closing in happened with digital contact. This software company re-purposed the available technologies and pivoted its business offering to develop a solution that squarely addressed the situation the seniors were in.  They developed a new and a more memorable way to stay connected for the elderly and their families and be aware of each other’s well-being. 

Studio in a smart phone

They developed a SaaS based video creation app which the elderly could use to create and share videos of their daily mundane activities and mini adventures.  Delivered from the cloud, the mobile app turned out to be a digital playground for the elderly.  It was a studio in a smart phone that is amazingly easy to use.  It is a platform to stitch and broadcast real-time memories which the receiving relatives could watch at leisure.  This asynchronous mode of high-quality communication resulted in peace of mind for the relatives but more importantly a purpose in the lives of the elderly.  The elderly could now be creative and give wings to their expressions.  They could share their life status and receive responses and feedback from their children.  It resulted in better bonding with their digital-savvy grandchildren.

“CES helped re-purpose the available technologies to develop a solution that squarely addressed the situation the seniors were in during the pandemic. “

CES helped develop this SaaS based video capturing and sharing app to help the residents stay in touch with their loved ones.  Videos can be easily stored and replayed in the app allowing the families to conveniently revisit the captured and shared memories whenever desired.  But the app also helped improve the attractiveness of the community, which was a surprise bonus.  The community became more desirable and talked about by the future dwellers.  The property management looked good as well and, ultimately, the property value went up. 

“When the distancing happened in physical contact, closing in happened with digital contact.”

Other uses of this digital solution

This technology found its application in other use cases as well.  A similar app was developed to operate as a platform to commemorate the life of a departed soul.   People could use this mobile phone-based platform to collate and sequence the pictures of a person expired. They could use it to share an emotional digital obituary and sum up a life well lived, and sometimes, to mourn a life that was cut a bit short.  A funeral home can offer this platform as an app and improve its services significantly by making a somber social gathering a little less grieving.

Technology continues to support human evolutionary journey from sapiens to a more intelligent social being. The digital evolution reconfirms the existence of the spirit that makes us human and humane. 

CES stands with its clients and partners

CES continues with its endeavours of making life more humane and to fulfil its obligation to make the pandemic a little less painful for the society. For a conversation on how CES can help your customer and the communities with our intention and innovation, please contact us at sales@cesltd.com.

Cloud Migration: Lessons From Cyber Trenches and Foundries

Posted on by Ces_creative

Key considerations for developing a sound cloud migration strategy

The cyber world is witnessing rapid changes in technology and business processes. The millennial or digital-native companies have lived on the cloud from day one.  However, the legacy companies do not have that advantage.  They are required to cloudify without impacting their existing business operations.  Cloudification provides an opportunity to companies of all kinds to reengineer their business processes.  It helps ensure system availability, data protection, and smooth rollback/recovery.  Most importantly, it offers improvement in overall operational efficiency.

System Integrators

The technology market is flooded with System Integrators who claim to have expertise in cloud migration.  Companies need an experienced partner who can devise an appropriate migration strategy and ease their journey to the cloud.  They need a partner who will travel with them through thick and thin with a stake in the success.

Cloud Migration: Key Considerations

CES is a System Integrator that has successfully guided customers in agribusiness, bioscience, ecommerce and other industries to migrate to cloud.  In our experience, the following aspects must be considered in developing a strategy for cloud migration.

  • Planning:  It is important to develop a prioritization framework for determining the order in which the business applications should be moved to the cloud.  A good prioritization framework is risk-weighted and ROI driven.  It takes into consideration all the key parameters that influence the success of an implementation.

A wholistic approach to doing this would be to consider prioritization of technology stacks, technology tiers, business functions, and applications.  In determining whether the migration approach should be a lift-and-shift or cloud-native development, consideration may be given to decoupling the front-end from the backend and migrating them independently. 

A good prioritization framework is risk-weighted and ROI driven.

  • Architecture:  Certain applications or certain parts of the technology stack may need to be retained or re-written or retired.  We should consider pros and cons for options like – Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Function as a Service (FaaS), Backend as a Service (BaaS) – in reimagining the future business and technology architecture.

Breaking application architecture into micro apps and micro services via Domain Driven Design (DDD) would be worth considering. Large monolithic applications are hard to maintain and scale. Newer applications follow the micro services-based architecture. The front-end and mobile applications can be broken in micro apps for specific functionality. This eliminates single point of failure, reduces down-time, improves performance, increases scalability, etc.  This also helps bring the cost of infrastructure down as many smaller instances are generally cheaper than one large instance of combined capacity.

  • Platform Vendor Selection:  AWS, Azure and Google are the main Cloud Service Providers.  However, depending on the business need, consideration may be given to niche providers like Rackspace or even a more traditional IBM if it makes compatibility and economic sense. 

Then, there could be a need to migrate thick-client desktops to the cloud and access them via VMware for easy portability and/or security reasons.  An experienced SI should be able to review your compute, storage, and bandwidth needs and recommend the right platform vendor.

  • Methodology:  An iterative or agile methodology is suited for modern application development.  In deciding the right methodology, companies may need to assess their resource skill level as well as the systems documentation quality.  For instance, if the system documentation levels are low, which is normally the case for traditional companies with legacy systems, Test Driven Development (TDD) approach would be a suitable methodology for Cloud Migration.  This would ensure that a verifiable Definition-of-Done (DoD) has been documented and agreed upon upfront.
  • Technology: The technology selection is perhaps the most difficult decision to make because of the existence of a plethora of technologies in the market with every technologist having their own favourite.  There are proprietary software and community-supported open-source software to choose from.  We have technologies like .NET Core, Node JS, Python, Java, RoR, etc. for the backend and have Angular, ReactJS, VueJS, Blazor, etc. for the frontend of applications.  A good SI will provide an unbiased advice on what technology would fit best in an organization.
  • Teams: The technology and domain skills of individuals is an important consideration.  It helps in determining the number of sprints, the size of scrums, the throughput of teams, defining milestones, etc.  This assessment also helps in determining skills gap, training and sourcing requirements.  The IT departments should work closely with the HR department in this assessment.
  • Other Considerations: There are other aspects like company policies, security, operating procedures, regulatory requirements, maintainability, etc. to keep in mind as well.  Data backup and data retention policies, down-time requirement, user base, geographic presence, etc. are also important considerations in developing a good cloud migration strategy.

The TDD approach ensures a verifiable Definition-of-Done (DoD) is documented and agreed upon upfront.

An Ideal Partner for Cloud Migration

An ideal SI partner would have experience and a proven cloud migration framework to assess and develop a tailored strategy for the needs of any IT department.  They would take into consideration the combination of people, processes, and technologies to develop the right tools like, checklists, templates, calculators, reusable assets, etc. to expedite the migration process.

An experienced Cloud Migration Partner will help you evolve into a “Cloud Native” IT department.  Cloud Native computing is helping companies upgrade existing applications, build new applications, and deliver automated services across private, public and hybrid clouds faster.

For more information or a conversation on Cloud migration, please contact rohit.vipinmathews@cesltd.com.  If you are interested to know how CES can help  you in your cloud journey, get in touch with us at sales@cesltd.com.

From Unstructured Data to Insight: Operational Information on Fingertips for Executive Decision Making

Posted on by Ces_creative

AI as a digital sieve to obtain critical information without manually sifting through data files

Time: A commodity under pressure

In the era of information overload and increasing regulatory paperwork, the time permitted for any action is not anymore linear by the strictest definition.  With attention span shortening – especially among the executives – and with the time-to-market shrinking, the time available for analysis and decision making has reduced exponentially.

If your job involves dealing with stacks of paper – physical or digital – requiring you to find not only answers but also insights and advice, your job is unequivocally unenviable.  You might be able to find a proverbial needle hidden in the haystack more easily than scanning for intangible information from the stack of digital pages with your eyes.  The job is not only thankless, prohibitively time-consuming and expensive, but also inefficient in this competitive world — the world where strategy and people are not the only differentiator but the computing/processing power as well.

A job that involves dealing with stacks of physical or digital paper to find insights is unequivocally unenviable. 

Speed, diligence, and intelligence

Businesses run on time-wheels involving tight schedules. Time is a commodity, but the time of executives and decision makers is a highly premium resource.

It is thus critical to reduce this seemingly mundane but highly detrimental activity of gleaning information from documents.  The process must be streamlined for producing better, quicker results using the right technology.  The era of Artificial Intelligence with the advancements made in Deep Learning algorithm coupled with enhanced processing power of machines has a promise to make such outcomes feasible. 

Intelligence beyond binary responses

Given this daunting ask, DIG (Data Insight Generator), the Reading Comprehension engine developed by CES, has fulfilled one such promise with its AI based Deep Learning algorithm.  This engine was developed and deployed for a Financial Advisor to help them with reading regulatory documents and collecting important compliance information relevant to the Financial Services industry.

This bot – with Deep Learning algorithm built in – was designed to work like a mini search-engine. It takes a query from the user in English and instantly gets informative answers from the data files.  It is built not only to provide binary – yes or no type – answers but also to be trained for sophisticated conditional answers.  The bot was initially trained by feeding it hundreds of documents.  It ‘learnt’ the various possible answers through adversarial methods by developing a cross-reference table of positive and negative words and understanding the underpinnings of such nomenclature. When CES ran the drill of training the bot, it proved that it could be trained in just 2-3 days instead of several weeks that was originally anticipated.

This bot is effective in any domain that involves reviewing reams and databases of paperwork and requires augmenting the human for effort reduction.  It can read not only text-based documents but images and scans as well through integration of OCR technology.  It has the potential to read operational information and generate summarized answers for quick executive decision making.

This bot is effective in and augmenting the human effort and getting insights from reams and databases of paperwork.

Other areas of influence

CES also developed Deep Learning algorithms that made a difference in work frames in other domains.

Smart Inventory Scanning

Inventory Management was another area that CES delved into using Deep Learning algorithm. The technique employed here was Object Recognition. A firm involved in packaging and transporting farm produce used the technique of scanning barcodes on each crate to update their inventory which was a time-consuming process. CES developed an algorithm wherein the neural network was trained to recognize barcodes in bulk just by clicking a picture of the stacked crates with a Smart Phone. The neural network-based app was used to scan 30 barcodes at a time and update the database for further processing thus reducing the effort 30x in this instance.

Predictive Intelligence in Healthcare Provisioning

An algorithm created for the Health Care sector, made ‘Care Steps Generation’ for patients simple and fast. A neural network was created by accumulating notes of care coordinators and the subsequent steps to be taken for therapy or follow-ups.  When a new test ‘note’ was fed to the network, the Care Steps Algorithm that CES developed was able to predict the next course of action or therapy, thus, demonstrating the promise of simplifying the work for the care coordinators.

Other possible enhancements

There are many other applications of this Deep Learning technology.  The above bot has been designed for basic Q&A purpose.  However, its functionality can be further enhanced by integrating it with Chat Bots to converse with humans and provide from a database confirmed answers or research-oriented options for further analysis. 

For more information or a conversation on how DIG can augment document reading and analysis to generate insights for your organization, please contact us at: sales@cesltd.com