Experian: The Hague, Netherlands October 2001-January 2004
With Experian I first worked in a 3 man team which developed an application that provided connectivity to multiple credit bureaus through a single interface. It retrieved raw bureau data, deduplicated, aggregated and stored it. This application was called Ciras and connected to the Dutch government bureau, BKR and Experians own Dutch credit bureau, EIS. This application supported both simple bureau enquiries and loan application processing and had two clients. It was originally developed for a Turkish bank called Finans who used it to retrieve credit history for loan applicants. It had also gone live with Vodafone and all new Dutch Vodafone clients were checked via this system with an average of 6000 checks per week.
The Ciras product was a combination of Web and back-end processing and was developed using Perl, C++, HTML, XML and Javascript. It ran on a combination of Linux and Windows 2000 platforms using a MYSQL database. I had worked on the project from its beginning and had been heavily involved in its specification and design. I specifically developed the Ciras Bureau Viewer which is a web based application used by Ciras customers to send credit check requests, search and display results and properly process BKR data. This application was multi-lingual and was built with generic reusable web components including an application portal, a session management module, an audit module (which could be used for billing purposes) and a password and access control module.
The Bureau Viewer was developed using Perl, Javascript and HTML and tools such as Microsoft Front Page. It ran on a Linux platform with Apache and MYSQL. Being a small team we had to do our own system and database administration. This meant that during the product lifecycle I had to
After working on the Bureau Viewer I designed and implemented a Pan European CRM system for Levi Strauss. This Web based system was used internally for storing purchase information of Dockers products and for doing mailing runs based on customer selections. It was developed in Perl using a MYSQL database on a Linux Apache platform.
My last project for Experian was the design and implementation of a generic web based loyalty application called DMO which ran on Oracle 9. DMO could be rapidly configured to support CRM for any client who's requirements fall within certain parameters. It was an abstract system based on a powerful entity/attribute relational model and had several add-on modules. These could produce a data warehouse, import data, validate postcodes, make powerful customer selections and do mail runs based on these selections. An existing Experian Progres application for a hygiene company called SCA had been configured in DMO and went live. This process entailed overcoming several technical problems. Even though DMO was constrained by a generic design, the old Progres SCA system was a fast terminal based data entry program with 700,000 existing customers and the SCA users expected similar levels of performance and usability from DMO. Solutions were designed which required the intelligent placement of cursors, accurate deduplication and the analysis of Oracle indexes so that they could be used in the most efficient manner possible.