Citigroup Inc. (branded Citi), is a major American financial services company based in New York, NY. Citigroup Inc. has the world’s largest financial services network, spanning 140countries with approximately 16,000 offices worldwide. Computec Engineering was originally contracted to assist one of the Citigroup subsidiary companies based in Japan and that scope later increased to working with them in Japan, Korea, Thailand and Taiwan.

A Citigroup Subsidiary needed to have access to their US head quarter systems which was a core business system and application to the Japan operations. Customizations were needed on both the Japan and US sides to allow Japan specific data to be integrated into the main US systems and also to integrate data from the US systems which were needed to make Japan specific reports for in-house analyses, clients, and Japan government agencies.

The Citigroup subsidiary approached Computec with a request to create a solution for coordinating, designing, developing, and integrating Japan specific data that would automatically be feed into Citigroup’s main computer systems in the US for calculations and processing and then the results would be automatically exported from the US to make various reports meet the Japan operations requirements.

Citigroup also asked Computec to help upgrade the Citigroup subsidiary’s technology infrastructure systems including e-mail systems, server and file systems, plus other technology systems in Japan.

Computec’s programming team worked with Citigroup’s internal programming team and business application consultants to analyze what data would be needed to be uploaded and what results could be provided by the US systems so that the required outputs could be provided in Japan. As the scope of the project was fairly small it was decided to use Microsoft databases and database engines to complete the project.

The initial software development implementation was a big success and Computec had successfully implemented the system within a few months. Along with the software development, Computec had made the technology infrastructure upgrades to the Japan operations. As the Japan operations were growing quickly and other offices in Asia were being planned, Computec was asked to make the core business application multi-lingual as well as have the software conform to support the country specific requirements for Korea, Thailand and Taiwan. As the requirements had grown for Japan and the cost to make adjustments to the global US based system were getting prohibitively expensive, Computec was asked to make a stand-alone system that would be used for all of Asia.

As Computec’s senior programmers had a good understanding of the business algorithms and business needs, the Computec team was sent to Korea, Thailand, and Taiwan to work with each country’s Senior Business Analysis Teams and to work with the US Software and technology team to develop and implement the new Asian software platform. As the new Asian software platform had to operate with the same algorithms and functions of the US systems and be just as redundant but also be localized for each specific country, the analysis, prototyping and testing was very intensive. All test case scenarios had to be tested with multiple data points to insure that the algorithms worked accurately and the programs functioned as expected.

The Asian platform solution was successfully developed, tested, and deployed within budget and within schedule. The Computec team was also asked to plan, design, implement, and support the office technology infrastructure in Japan, Korea, Thailand and Taiwan which Computec also successfully accomplished.