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Solving Customer Problems First

When you need best in class Oracle consulting services, turn to LCS Technologies. With LCS, you get quality solutions, expert technical skills and quick, well-documented problem resolution for all your Oracle needs.

For LCS, solving customer problems comes first. Unlike many Oracle consulting companies that simply throw resources at a technical problem, LCS takes a “holistic” approach. LCS starts by looking first at the business problem you are trying to solve, then they take the time to understand the complete picture before applying the most effective technical solution.

This approach enables LCS’s elite technical team to increase your team’s productivity which reduces project and programming costs, and maximizes the efficiency of your IT infrastructure.

Oracle Problems Solved
Here are just a few of the ways that LCS can improve the way your IT organization operates.

• Increases the efficiency of your Oracle investment by delivering mission critical application development, database upgrades and performance tuning.

• Increases your team’s productivity by:
o Reducing project development time, eliminating costly programming errors which immediately improves the overall productivity of your end users.
o Providing high quality documentation, creating a knowledge base for you and reducing internal staff training time.

• Reduces project and programming costs by:
o Faster development, migrations, deployments and upgrades.
o More effective diagnostics and troubleshooting
o Proactive system reviews and performance tuning.

To find out how LCS can deliver quality results that reduce overall cost of your product lifecycle CALL 1-855-277-5527.

Virtual Office in the Cloud

Leading with innovation saved LCS the cost of office space, a $15,000 to $25,000 expense for 2010, and provided their clients with better, faster service at the same time.

When LCS needed an office to house critical documentation, the partners chose the cloud instead of a commercial office building. LCS is using new tools, innovative internal practices, and the kind of cloud computing applications it frequently recommends to clients to save the cost and the static location drawbacks of a physical office.

LCS’ uses Box.net to consolidate and secure its paperwork in one location and Apple’s iPad as a collaboration tool for meetings, connection and conversation, whenever and wherever that might be.

The value of this innovation and efficiency was proven recently when LCS cofounder, Steve Simonetto, was waiting for a doctor’s appointment and received an urgent client request. Instead of the usual business delays of needing to get to the office to locate the paperwork, scan and Email it later, Steve logged on to Box.net from his iPad right in the waiting room and the document was available to the client within seconds of the phone call.

LCS’ elite technical team takes a “holistic” approach to problem solving by addressing the business problem first and then looking at the technical solutions.

Ignoring Conventional Wisdom

“In some cases we need to set aside conventional best practices and start with a blank page to find the root of the problem,” explains Stephane Come’, LCS cofounder.

“I remember a situation where a customer technical lead told me, ‘this goes against all the conventions, everything I’ve learned’. And it did. The solution I recommended defied conventional wisdom but it worked. It solved the problem and reduced the processing time ten-fold,” he adds.

For one state government agency, LCS wrote proprietary documentation software and a rules engine that generated documentation automatically reducing the amount of manual documentation by 40%. This solution also reduced developer headcount and the cost of a technical writer.

Beyond the initial cost savings and efficiencies, the software eliminated the need for continued manual updates of the documentation as the application was being developed and upgraded.

Case Study: Fortune 500 Company

Problem: This Fortune 500 Retailer’s call center needed to rebuild its internal database team after an outsourcing decision proved inefficient in handling the upgrade, maintenance and scaling issues associated with the retailer’s new inventory system. This company needed senior-level expertise and enterprise performance tuning expertise to maximize throughput for batch and interface jobs. It needed experienced database professionals to analyze performance in production and pre-production environments and develop strategies for improvement.

Solution: The company chose LCS to fill the void in its programming and enterprise database management teams because of the experience and skill set of its elite technical team. LCS was able to provide our client the solution for performance tuning and scaling new Inventory System deployed for the company, including transactions consuming billions of records on multi-terabyte databases.

LCS assisted in the design and development of the infrastructure to ensure maximum throughput for batch and interface jobs, including physical database layout and server configuration, and including but not limited to, SAN, Unix and Database layout. The LCS team was able to review the application and interface (SQL and PL/SQL) code for tuning opportunities. LCS also analyzed performance in production and pre-production environments in order to develop strategies for maximizing the Oracle infrastructure.

Results and Benefits: Our client’s IT management team commended LCS on its expertise and ability to provide the right solution. We thoroughly investigated their business and technical problems, provided an effective holistic solution and the right documentation to ensure that the client’s ongoing performance tuning and maintenance could be handled quickly and easily. LCS also exceeded our client’s expectations through our timely and relevant communication throughout the project.

Case Study: California Department of Justice

Problem: DOJ’s mission critical (police officer safety/lives at stake) Criminal Justice Information Systems (CJIS) were initially developed over 30 years ago and continued to run on an antiquated platform. They became difficult, if not impossible, to maintain and increasingly expensive to operate. DOJ needed to modernize these applications without disrupting strict service levels to over 60,000 law enforcement agencies throughout California.

Solution: LCS was responsible for the design, application integration, and implementation of these applications from the legacy Unisys/COBOL environment to the new Oracle/Sun CJIS Open Systems Environment. These applications are responsible for processing message-based requests from the law enforcement community in California that are submitted through the CLETS telecommunications network and returning the response based on information stored in the CJIS database. The six applications LCS redesigned are Firearms Eligibility (FEAF), California Restraining and Protective Orders (CARPOS), Automated Firearms (AFS), Supervised Release (SRF), Wanted Persons (WPS), and Stolen Vehicles and Boats (SVS/ABS).

Results and Benefits: DOJ chose to redesign/redevelop these applications using Oracle technology. DOJ chose LCS because of the specialized skills of its elite technical team and our speed and response time in completing the mission critical elements of the project. In partnership with the IT staff at DOJ, LCS was able to complete the redesign and redeployment of these highly complex systems and provided DOJ with a new knowledge base for internal staff training and development on the new systems.

“LCS has the ability to go beyond the database migration and look at the challenges of the architecture itself. Stephane did one of the best jobs I’ve seen at understanding the problem. Their team had the skills sets we needed,” Jim Brown, Bureau Chief, State of California, Department of Justice.

A Day with the LCS Elite Technical Team

Imagine an IT department where a team of programmers, DBAs, technical leads and project managers work together effectively and efficiently to create an elegant architecture to support well built applications.

Now stop imagining. Meet the Elite Technical Team from LCS Technologies.

To see how this team has changed the rules of Oracle software and service consulting, take a walk through a typical day with Elite Team members Ara Davis, Martin Ferrier, Greg Ledford, Steve Simonetto and Stéphane Côme.

Connected Communication
Stephane: “We talk before the day starts. We talk after the day ends. We talk during the day. We aren’t just planning the day. We are all in sync on the project. And we keep the customer in synch.”

Ara: “In my role I do a lot of communicating so rather than send an email to someone, I may walk over and talk with them because it is more personal and I want them to feel more connected to us.”
Holistic Thinking
Taking a long term and comprehensive view of the customer’s problem is the bedrock of LCS consulting approach. They call it holistic thinking.

Greg: “We don’t just look at that one problem. We are always looking to see what other ways we can help our client beyond what we are currently working on.”

Bridging Boxes
Stephane: “I feel like we (the IT industry) have gotten to a point where everyone is in their own box. We are not allowed or encouraged to go to someone else’s box. I want to bridge the boxes and solve the whole problem not just a piece of it.”

Build it Right the First Time
The Elite Team is not looking to turn a consulting project into a never ending revenue stream by creating application fix after application fix.

Martin: “When I build an application, I think of myself like a custom home builder. If I do my job right. I finish the job and you never see me again.”

Steve: “Until you are ready to add on a room. Then we are the builder you want to ask back in.”

Now you can stop imagining a time when your project teams work effectively and efficiently together….call in LCS’ Elite Technical Team and start working that way today!

Real-Time Application Documentation

Be honest. When was the last time your custom application was fully documented and up to date?

If you’re like most companies, it has probably been awhile and for a very good reason. Business needs and the software applications that support them change constantly. Development time trumps paperwork. One software rev follows another, and pretty soon the application on the server and the documentation in the drawer are completely different.

It may be that the application was never fully documented in the first place or that the size and complexity of the application required so much documentation that even if you have it, your development team can’t use it effectively.

The challenge comes when a serious issue occurs or when a major application upgrade is looming. Then it may take days or weeks of new discovery to find the root of the problem, a waste of time and money that could have been prevented if the documentation was usable.

Never be Out of Date Again
When your challenge is out of date, complex or unusable documentation, LCS Technologies has the solution. The company’s Document Engine creates documentation in real time as the code is being written. When the code changes it is a simple routine to update the documentation to the latest version. This means that no matter how many times your software application changes, the documentation will always reflect the current code and business rules.

LCS’ Document Engine reduces the time and money needed for technical writers. It also enables a business analyst to do some of the work that normally requires expensive developer time. Another key benefit is the archival capability which is a document repository which allows for real time discovery of the information needed to validate application code and business rules.

How It Works
There are three components to the LCS Document Engine.

• Document Engine which provides the framework for developing documentation for each application.
• Custom module for each customer or environment. This is the piece that gathers the information needed to create the documentation.
• Information framework, LCS Technologies’ proprietary data formatting scheme for collecting and generating the information.

The documentation process begins with an agreement between our client and LCS as to what kind of documentation is required for the application. LCS then creates a custom module to retrieve, collect and store that information.

The Next Step
Future releases of the documentation engine will enable real-time search and indexing via interlinked Web pages so that they can be collaboratively used by multiple users within the corporation or community.

Maximize Your Resources
With LCS Document Engine, a business analyst (BA) can replace a technical writer and reduce developer time because the BA can input data directly into a format that the documentation engine understands so input becomes the output. This process also makes analysis easier. Instead of a programmer doing 100% of the work, a BA is able to enter the data in the system that feeds the application so a BA can do 50% of a developers work.

When out of date documentation is the problem, LCS Technologies has the solution─real-time documentation that saves time and money. That’s what Leading with Innovation is all about.

LCS Database Xccelerator Changes the Rules

Database Overload.Total System Shutdown. It’s a doomsday scenario that strikes fear in the heart of every database administrator. Combine that with the busiest and most critical sales month of the year for your company and you’ve got a DBA’s worst nightmare.

Here’s the story of how one company faced a nightmare situation and came out ahead of the game.

The Meltdown
This Fortune 500 online retailer handles thousands of transactions per day on a regular basis. Accounting and business operations require that the transactions be batched nightly with jobs typically taking 6 to 10 hours to complete on an Oracle 10g RAC database.

This online retailer is popular, business is booming and daily transactions are on the increase. Their success leads to slower batch times. Experts are called in. The Elite Team from LCS Technologies joins the retailer’s database team in an effort to enhance performance. There is no time or money to re-architect the application and database, so standard performance methods are applied. The team does all the right things: SQL optimization and database tuning. And it works—for a while.

Then the black Friday comes and that night a batch job that is supposed to take 10 hours takes 22 and the system rolls back. Business analysts, sales and marketing teams are waiting for previous day’s reports. But the reports are not available. Business activity stops. The quiet is eerie and deadly to a retailer that counts on the holidays for more than half its yearly sales.

The AHA Moment
The retailer’s team and LCS’s elite technical team can’t increase system performance using standard tools. There is no known solution. It is time to rethink the situation.

The solution was elegant, simple and totally unconventional. It involved converting the application from single-threaded to multi-threaded. Here’s how it worked.

With minimal changes to the application, the LCS team was able to extract the core business logic from the system. Think of it as open heart surgery for a damaged database.

Once the core logic was extracted, the team was able to run the code through its database Xccelerator, a framework that enables code to run in parallel processes. The process is not without its perils. Because of the limited time available, even standard testing is eliminated. Instead, the team opts for auditing to protect against errors.

The Happy Ending
The database Xccelerator enables a DBA to take a single-threaded database application and make it multi-threaded while keeping the original code 100% safe. It is the equivalent of taking a single lane road and turning it into a 16-lane freeway overnight.

Using The LCS database Xccelerator process, a batch job that took 22 hours now takes a little as two hours. The retailer catches up with its business reports in two days and business activity returns to as normal as it gets for a global retailer at Christmas time.

The bonus was the retailer’s database team is able to use the Xccelerator process on all their other batch jobs, making it a very happy holiday season indeed.

The Journey Continues
Batch process acceleration is just one of the many ways LCS’s database Xccelerator is being used by their Oracle-based clients. Another client, a major telecom company, is using the Xccelerator to scale a real-time pattern analysis tool. A government agency is using it for database conversion to make data conversions from legacy systems to Oracle-based systems as much as 10X faster as standard tools. When used with Exadata, the performance increases are even more substantial.

Another advantage is that the process does not require any new hardware or software purchases. While products like the LCS database Xccelerator exist, they are expensive. LCS’ solution is native to Oracle. The process is easy for a DBA to learn and LCS offers mentoring to ensure the knowledge transfer is complete.

LCS’s Elite Technical Team has a simple philosophy: Lead with Innovation and empower the customer to maximize their infrastructure and make their team more efficient so that they become the elite team in their own company.

For more information or to receive a 1:1 consultation, please contact LCS at info@lcs-technologies-inc.com.

LCS Helping You Make the Right Connections

LCS has a simple philosophy: help our customers make the right connections to achieve successful and measurable business results. We call it “Connecting the Dots.” It means seeking the best solutions and making the right connections by pinpointing the best resources: people, partners, hardware and software needed to solve your business problem. Once we’ve identified the right “dots,” we seamlessly integrate all of these “dots” into the right business solution to address end user challenges and create stronger customer relationships.

Our Connect the Dots approach enables us to provide best in class solutions for your IT needs by leading with innovation, providing the highest quality customer care, and helping you to maximize your infrastructure and operational efficiency.

Seeing the Big Picture
By stepping back and looking at the big picture from the business perspective, LCS can identify the challenges and the problems that need to be solved even when the connections are not clear.

“The connections are always there. Even when it is not obvious what needs connecting or how it will connect,” explains Stéphane Côme, LCS CEO.

Once the dots and connect points are identified, LCS puts the right information services team in place to connect them.

Five Keys to Connecting the Dots
Our Connect the Dots approach is based on five principles:

1. Be agnostic about the solution. Find the best in class “dots”: people, vendors, partners, hardware, software, delivery and pricing. At LCS, we start with questions, not answers: What is the problem? What results are expected? What is the optimal solution? Once we have the questions, we connect the appropriate dots to provide the best answers.
2. Unchain the process. Too often, companies are constrained by following a process, this may be an old process developed many years ago when technology limitations dictated the process. When the objective is to create connections that are not obvious or that may not yet exist, process can be the problem rather than the solution. If you follow a process along a well-traveled path, you may miss opportunities because the process puts arbitrary constraints on how you view the problem and the potential remedies–essentially, stifling innovation.
3. Remove constraints to see the opportunities. It’s difficult if not impossible to connect the dots if you have artificial constraints on what you think you can do or achieve. When these constraints are removed, thinking can be changed, innovation is unleashed and business results can be improved, often dramatically.
4. Lead with Innovation. From solving a customer problem to finding the most efficient way to operate internally, LCS leads with innovation. The solutions often recommended by LCS are not just based on Best Practices, but are driven by experienced staff, prior successes and shared domain knowledge. The LCS team is always looking for new ways to maximize efficiency and reduce costs. For LCS, business as usual-isn’t.
5. Make the connection for the customer even if there is no tangible reward for LCS. The key is creating the connection and making sure the connection is an advantage for the customer.

Call LCS (855-277-5527) today and let us know how we can help you make the right connections for your information technology challenge.