Project Information

TECHNOLOGIES

What is SODA?

SODA, short for System Oriented Data Analytics, is an Enterprise System built for PwC. SODA, also known as Optics, is used to analyse client data where the client uses ERP’s (Enterprise Resource Planning) to manage and run their organisation. Typically these are large global organisations or at a minimum, multinational organisations. SODA is used to mitigate a wide range of business risks, including fraud prevention and business process improvement.

SODA currently caters for the following four ERP’s, J.D. Edwards, PeopleSoft, Oracle EBS and Oracle Cloud. Each of these platforms consist of different major releases or versions, each with their own data security models. SODA supports all of the mainstream versions, and uses a plugin architecture to separate the various platforms and releases. Each ERP system is it’s own SODA plugin, sharing the common features of SODA’s framework.

Each ERP system has its own specific terminology and their underlying data models are vastly different. SODA transforms these concepts into PwC business terminology, thus, bringing the data reports closer to home and more comprehensible from a business point of view. This provides a consistent user experience and reduces the user onboarding time between the different ERP data reports.

What is BeingIT®’s involvement?

BeingIT® is responsible for managing, consulting, developing and supporting SODA on behalf of PwC. SODA is used as part of the many client service offerings that PwC has in their Consulting and Trust line of service. SODA is installed on a range of large scale dedicated production environments in various data centres across the world.

It would not be possible to do the analysis that SODA does manually. The ERP client security data is very complex and far too large for any human to comprehend in a short space of time.

How is SODA put together?

SODA is a large scale Enterprise System and thus, consists of many different components and has a range of integrations and APIs making it an extensible product.

At its core, SODA has three main UI front-ends, a web portal called the SODA Portal, developed in ASP.NET MVC, a Windows client application, called SODA CS, developed in .NET Windows Forms and a redistributable data and report viewer called SODA Data Explorer also developed in .NET Windows Forms. On the server side there are five .NET Windows Services, each with specialised responsibilities and multiple service workers.

Due to the large scale of the data SODA needs to handle and process, efficiency is key and the entire system needs to be very robust. The dedicated servers are always on and thus the services need to be very memory efficient and self correcting to ensure they can and will run for months on end without the need for intervention or maintenance.