Technologies & Frameworks
About the company & UNEX™ system
International Post Corporation (IPC) is a cooperative association of 26 national postal services from major countries in Europe, Asia Pacific and North America. IPC’s main activities are providing assistance to its postal members, whose businesses activities include mail, parcels, express, logistics, retail and banking services.
IPC’s UNEX™ system is used to measure international letter service performance for 36 operators with about 400,000 test items, sent from / to more than 50 countries on four continents. The system is a complex platform showing the activity of about 10,000 users (called panellists).
The Challenge
IPC’s UNEX is a system that requires ongoing implementation of new features, but also continuous optimization that aim to improve business processes. During the project implementation there were encountered a few issues, but the most challenging one was related to performance. A few database queries were used a lot more than required, thus increasing the processing time.
The problem arose because of the number of SQL operations to the Oracle database that were made during the process. It was making a lot of duplicate calls to the database, thus adding time until the process was finished. This was affecting the business process.
The Solution
ISD has identified the issue by analyzing the business logic of the process closely with business analysts, adding logging and stopwatches to check which steps had a time overhead.
We’ve discovered that the whole process was iterating over 8000 objects, but because duplicate iterations were required, the process was a loop that was iterated over 40000 times. This got us to the idea that it is possible that we are making more than 8000 calls to the database per process, thus adding a lot of overhead.
We have fixed this challenge by using an in-memory cache, we’ve reduced substantially from the database calls overhead as all the objects were already available to be used. Since most of the database calls in the loop were made with the same parameters, this was one of the best course of action.
“What impressed me was the quality of the project and the high standards set by the customer. Everything must be tested, and the code should be written in a clean manner. Even though the project is quite sizeable, it was trouble-free to start working on it, as everything was arranged and named in a well-thought way.”
Stanislav Sanduta
The Result
After applying our fix to the test environment, we’ve observed a 15-hour time reduction. Now, the process takes between 45 minutes to 1 hour.
Read more about the exact steps of this solution and much more in this Blog article.
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F.A.Q.
Do you have additional questions?
The process of onboarding and hiring is different from project to project, but on average we start our projects in about 2-3 months.
All ISD people hold either graduate or post-graduate degrees and all of them are fluent in English. Our talents conduct courses at the Technical University of Moldova and also, they mentor various educational programs for IT specialists. Our developers are certified by Oracle, Cisco, Microsoft & other providers.
Definitely! We encourage our customers to have virtual meetings with the candidates and visit the ISD office to meet the entire team.
All our employees and partners signed a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) and we also sign an NDA with our customers. Thus, all employees involved in a project, are bound to discretion and confidentiality.
We believe in long term partnerships, and we aim to establish a relationship based on trust and full commitment. We have developed internal programs to increase the technical capabilities of our developers and team leads, but also their capacity to establish a strong communication with our customers in order to understand better their needs and expectation. And ultimately, for every engagement we assign a delivery lead, who’s primary goal is to ensure high quality of our services and customer satisfaction in general.
