References

Danubia Patent and Trademark Office is a long-term market leader in the protection of intellectual property, with 50 years of experience. 4D Soft has been Danubia’s contracted supplier since it was established in 1990. Our IT system supports an extremely complex administrative activity for approximately 100 users. We follow the full life cycle of the protection of patents, trademarks and designs from research through the acquisition of rights until expiry. Administrators at Danubia manage work relations with customer numbers on a scale of ten thousand in many countries worldwide. The mailing system is capable of generating letters, faxes and e-mail using hundreds of templates in four languages. Both correspondence and invoices are generated to meet specific requirements of a large number of partners.

Danubia provides services in a highly sensitive market built on strong trust, where the slightest mistake may have severe legal and business implications. The fact that we have been able to cooperate continuously to the satisfaction of our client against such requirements in an atmosphere of absolute trust for 20 years now is proof of the success of our quality assurance.

CPI is an American enterprise engaged in patent renewal and data cleaning. Serving over 2,000 clients, CPI manages approximately 3.5 million patents, corresponding to some 5.6 million cases (the same patent is normally issued in more than one country). As companies can deal with the renewal of a limited number of patents themselves, the majority of CPI’s customers are global enterprises with thousands of patents each.

We have been dealing with CPI since 1995, continuously improving and maintaining the software system.

About the project:

• The software must be highly reliable, because if a patent is not renewed, protection will be terminated.
• The system runs on an IBM AS400 computer located in the USA.
• The Budapest team works remotely.

CPI has purchased a database from the European Patent Office, which contains documents on patents in essentially every country around the world. 4D Soft manages all related processes (weekly renewals, automated maintenance and verification of CPI data).

Despite the great distance, work has been carried out smoothly for over 15 years now, to the complete satisfaction of both companies.

The Department of Industrial Law at EGIS is responsible for the administration of the pharmaceutical manufacturer’s own patents and trademarks. In this system too, process control for the registration and maintenance of patents and trademarks had to be aligned with the processes of patent offices. Owing to circumstances specific to EGIS, that alignment required support for several internal processes such as the management of active substances, pharmaceutical naming and related international research, which is extremely diverse.

Our industrial law system is integrated with several components of EGIS’ IT system: with SAP for finance, with Lotus Notes for document management, and with the corporate LDAP system for authentication processes.

Our professional relationship with Magyar Telekom and its predecessors dates back to 1996. We have contributed to a variety of development, planning and architectural tasks along several technology changes.

Our 4GL class library was used for the design of the customer service and billing system for Westel 900, as part of which 4D Soft contributed to the development of various modules. When the client–server architecture was converted into a three-tier system, these modules were ported to a modern application server. 4D Soft played a major role in creating the class libraries of the new system and in elaborating the development methodology.

T-Mobile was among the first in Hungary to opt for the design of SOA infrastructure. As part of system integration tasks, 4D Soft contributed to several joint projects for the elaboration of a development and planning methodology, which was built on the foundations of various UML-based generation techniques. A SOA pilot project was run to set out BPM modelling techniques and the methodology for designing SOA services. Subsequently, T-Mobile built on these foundations to launch its SOA RoadMap project, as part of which 4D Soft also contributed to SOA governance work.

4D Soft has been developing T-Mobile’s Webshop since 2004. The web interface of the Webshop enables consumers to purchase mobile phones and related accessories in various subscription plans. The Webshop is far more complex than the “average” internet store. Apart from purchasing individual devices in the colours and sizes available, it allows consumers to choose from a variety of subscription plans, select phone numbers, and use discounts. The services are improved on a continuous basis.  Today, customers can use self-service functions to switch between subscription plans and activate pay-as-you-go or pre-paid services e.g. for efficient mobile internet access.

T-Mobile’s Webshop has a separate interface for corporate customers, offering plenty of additional services in an even greater variety of plans. High-level integration with back-end systems enables each corporate customer to use the services subject to the terms and pricing algorithms which are specified in their contracts, and may even be customised. Additionally, the Virtualoso Shop provides ASP-based services to various large enterprises.

Thanks to increasing levels of automation and integration, customer service is continuously improving, which is essential for successful competition.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the EU’s priority project, headquartered at CERN. The hadron collider produces extremely large amounts of data, processing which requires special software based on grid technology. In the past six years, also supported by the EU and involving over a hundred European institutions, the EGEE project series have been gearing the grid-based widdleware called gLite towards processing the vast amounts of data from the collider. From a software engineering perspective, gLite is a distributed system which is developed in various programming languages, maintained and operated by a great number of developers at geographically dispersed institutions. The ETICS project was launched in 2006 with support from the EU to meet that challenge, and ran until February 2010.

The project was designed to create a higher-level management tool above existing software integration, testing and release management tools, which would be capable of serving the life cycle of the software dedicated to the LHC. In that project, 4D Soft was leading the R&D task of test integration.

The implemented ETICS currently includes a number of open-source test tools and static analyzers, which enable it to provide complex quality assurance for traditional, web-based and distributed systems. The work of project managers is assisted by key functions of system monitoring and software metrics. The ETICS system allows easy registration and use of new tools. A high-level workflow manager enables fast design and maintenance of distributed deployment and testing processes.

Following completion of the project, 4D Soft enhanced the system to make it suitable for application in industrial environments as well. For further information, visit the ETICS page at http://etics.web.cern.ch/etics/use.htm and http://4dsoft.hu/eticsproject.

In 1998, 4D Soft was commissioned to set up an IT system to support the full range of commercial and logistic processes in MOL’s LPG business. As part of BPR, we worked with senior executives of the business to review the processes applied in a great number of locations across Hungary for production, storage, offloading, processing, as well as domestic, export and import wholesale and retail trade. A new business information model was set up and used for the design, implementation and roll-out of the IT system. Thanks to exemplary cooperation with executives at various levels as well as with users contributing at a number of locations nationwide, the system was rolled out smoothly.

Integration with the Hungarian Railway’s IT system enabled tracking approximately 1,000 tank wagons and directing emptied wagons to their stations. As a result, jams and wagon shortages, causing significant losses previously, were soon eliminated. Interruptions were also eliminated in receiving import consignments from Russia. The system also greatly improved the level of organisation in the control of road tankers, in filling installed gas containers, and in supply to the retail network distributing LPG cylinders. Clear and continuously updated information on the overall turnover and stock administration provided executives and distributors with a major advantage.

In 2001, a central decision was adopted by MOL on the organisation-wide implementation of SAP. 4D Soft offered cooperation in areas where SAP had no solution to manage highly specialised processes, which was not accepted. Following four years of successful operations, our system was taken offline.