CMMI Appraisal

Arowana Consulting Ltd is proud to announce that it's Customized Software Application Development Projects has been appraised at Capability Maturity Model Integration for Development or
CMMI-DEV(r) - Maturity Level 3. This accomplishment was announced by the SEI following a formal "Class A" Standard CMMI(r) Appraisal Method for Process Improvement by certified SEI Lead Appraiser Teenu Puri, KPMG.

CMMI is a process improvement approach that provides organizations with the essential elements of effective processes that ultimately improve their performance.

An appraisal at maturity level 3 indicates that the organization is performing at a "defined" level. At this level, processes are well characterized and understood, and are described in standards, procedures, tools and methods. The organization's set of standard processes, which is the basis for maturity level 3, is established and improved over time.

Arowana Consulting, established in 2006, is an emerging IT services and products Company which began with a firm belief to create a Company with strong domain expertise. Arowana realizes that a company can survive once they prove their credentials and establish themselves as a reliable partner to Organizations, enabling them to continuously deliver their vision.
Arowana delivers high end technology products and services which accelerates the growth of any Organization. Arowana Consulting is focused on providing IT services and holistic solutions across Banking and Financials, Aviation, Healthcare, Public Sector and Telecom industries. Arowana has successfully executed turn-key ERP projects, Application Development and Support, Banking business solutions, Managed Services and Skill Secondment on core functions, Infrastructure and Securities as well as Compliance / Consulting projects for these important clients. In the process Organizations have been able to maximize returns on their existing investments in technologies and solutions in a much easier and less complicated manner by adopting emerging trends in IT, thus taking the organizations to a much higher level.

Arowana Consulting today is relied on to deliver customized solutions, to provide end to end services in Product engineering, participate in the Product Management Life cycle, leverage technology evolutions such as Mobile Application Development and Social Media. Arowana Consulting's core competency is to keep Organizations competitive by providing niche services and helping them to evolve with painless adoption of new technologies, by standardizing business process, reducing costs, increasing agility and eventually in reaping the benefits.

CMMI is the result of more than 20 years of ongoing work at Carnegie Mellon University by members of industry, government and the Software Engineering Institute. Powered by Carnegie Mellon, the CMMI Institute is working to build upon CMMI's success, advance the state of the practice, accelerate the development and adoption of best practices and provide solutions to the emerging needs of businesses around the world.

This achievement clearly demonstrates our commitment to a high level of process improvements that assure delivery of quality products, services and solutions. We apply this approach to our work groups, projects and across our entire organization. By adopting this approach we have had a varied amount of benefits such as increased project efficiency, improved team communications, accelerated project cycles, quality enhancements and more.

DART- A staff travel Management system

Successful, leading Airlines across the globe provide travel benefits to their staff, depending on their roles and grades.  Managing airline staff travel is not only challenging, it carries significant operating costs.  Each airline has a policy of its own for their employee travel benefits.  Companies allow their employees to travel with some discounted travel benefits. Since the benefactor is a staff member of a particular airline, this feature is known as Staff Travel Management.

Travel Management is a specialized business, besides staff being travelers on an airline, there are numerous vendors and consults who travel on behalf of the airline, ticket reservations and cancellation are made available for them as well. STMS is an automated package; it eliminates manual errors and originates a proper work flow process. Separate administration is not necessary; each employee of the airline who is entitled to staff can administer his own benefits without having to visit staff travel desk. He can avail his benefits from his desk or over the internet as the system will clearly recognize his entitlements.

DUTY AND RECREATION TRAVEL (DART):

Arowana has developed a web based application, that facilities the management of staff travel on behalf of an airline, known as Duty and Recreation Travel (DART).   DART is a comprehensive Staff Travel solution that handles duty and leisure travel with seamlessly integrated reservation systems.  DART being a web based application facilitates to staff travel needs; It has a booking engine to carry out live air bookings. The automatic ticketing system reduces workload on the processing agents; it accurately eliminates human errors in computation of fares and taxes.

DART’s efficient ticket application process performs most of the checks at the time of applying, therefore reducing responsibility of processing agents. The tracking system used by the processing agents helps to track the requests of the requester and agent, eliminating risks of errors being lost en route.

The application is driven by a rules engine which manages the entitlements making it robust and flexible to manage.  There are various other interface applications employed to make use of the needed functionalities.

DART’s duty travel approval saves an employee time in approaching their supervisor. He can claim his expenses after returning from duty travel. The automated online transfer of Duty travel claims the amount to salary, thus saving manual input into financial system.

DART carters to global delivery systems. It helps provide various flight benefits to every employee irrespective of his role, grade or responsibilities, brought under the DART preview depending on the airline policies. However the scheme can be ruled out for existing, ex- employees, retired employees, vendors and guests of the airline. 

DART integrates with Sabre Reservation system or Amadeus , Oracle HRMS, Payroll and with various payment gateways to process payments through Net Banking, Credit Card, Debit Card and Cash Cards.

Taste of Design

A few days back I was browsing through some Airline product sites as a part of my research on what a customer would feel while browsing through a product site. I was trying to place my foot in the shoes of an end user and look through his point of view on want would attract him to a particular product page. According to my taste I found a bunch of sites each with a different aspect to comment on. I found a few pages that were cluttered with the design and content put together. I found a few with heavy designs and loud colours. There were sites where I found the navigation confusing. I began to pen down my analysis in order to understand the design sense better.
The following evening I walked into a coffee shop and ordered for a cappuccino. As the waiter brought my coffee to my table, I began to notice the mug carefully. My coffee was served in a mug rather than a cup. The mug had cartoons on it, one look at the mug which got me thinking, it was not the coffee that had drew my attention, it was the presentation of the coffee. There was a sense of design in the presentation.
Design is best accepted by its presentation, how well you place your product on the platter of design would appeal to your users better. Design is what draws at least 60-70 percent of the users attention.
If design plays such a key role, what can we do to make our designs suit our products? The answer is simple "Design Thinking".
Design Thinking enables all aspects of how an end user uses an interactive product, the way it must feel in his hands, the way he must perceive the design, understand how it works, how they feel while using it, overall it must serve a purpose for the customer making it fit in the context of our usage.
While design thinking the designers must think on broad lines. He/ she must decide on the colour and font play. There must be a balance between warm and cool colours. Bold colours play too harsh on the eyes of a viewer, pastel colours may tend to be a strain. Rather use balanced and contrasted colours, that match the company colours as well, we would not want to lose our brand in the midst of a design.
The font must not be too stylish or too bold, a moderate standard and readable font will do well. Our customers will not be admiring the style of our fonts, but would be reading the content.
While designing we need to focus on our customers needs and not specifically on a technology alone. Intersession of business and technology would bring about innovative idea out of a brain stormed session. Design thinking is an iterative learning process wherein the team redefines the problem, creates a need finding, ideation, builds prototypes and tests the results. This process gives the designer a tangible approach at every level of the design understanding complex challenges.
Let us just explore and give our customers a taste of design.
Present the design well the product is bought. It is all about presenting a good design to a bunch of customers. The best user experience can be given to a customers with a balanced combination of design and technology. Let the user feel the design of the product.