ConSol*: Latest News

ConSol* ranks among the Top 10 of Europe‘s best employers

Tue, 25 May 2010 10:25:00 +0200

A sustainable corporate culture pays off

For the fifth time running, ConSol* has obtained an excellent position among Europe’s Top Employers: Within the competition „Best Workplaces in Europe“, ConSol* achieved eighth place in the category entitled “Companies with up to 500 employees“.

Every year the Great Place to Work Institute Europe determines the 100 best employers in Europe using a proprietary analysis method. As part of this process, the institute anonymously surveys a large number of employees and companies, in order to evaluate the quality and attractiveness of the employers. ConSol* attracted particular praise for

the transparency of communication in the company,
its democratic corporate leadership,
work/life balance.

“We are proud that our open corporate politics have been recognized several times consecutively, at both the national and European level. Especially in economically precarious periods it is essential to pursue consequently our corporate culture and its advantages. Not least, if critical decisions are pending, we want to rely even more on regular communication and a lively exchange of views with our employees to create trust and boost creativity. Because our employees’ motivation and their top performance for our customers are the motor for the company‘s sustainable success“, says Dr. Ulrich Schwanengel, the founder and CEO of ConSol*. The celebratory award ceremony took place on 19 May 2010 in the Casino de Madrid in the Spanish capital.

Islamic Banking: ConSol* develops application for FWU

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 09:48:00 +0200

Development, maintenance and operation of POS applications for the sale of Shari`ah compliant life insurance policies in the Arabic speaking region
Two years of successful cooperation between FWU AG and the IT service provider ConSol* ConSol* Software GmbH, a specialist in the development, integration and operation of complex IT systems, has been supporting the development, maintenance and operation of FWU AG's Point of Sale (POS) applications over the past two years. The FWU Group is an independent, nationally and internationally active financial services provider specializing in fund-related life and pension insurance policies. The company has on a number of occasions received international acclaim as the best provider of Islamic life insurance policies. FWU, an internationally-oriented financial services provider with its head office in Munich, utilizes in its front office a web application jointly developed and supported by ConSol*. The application enables it to sell Shari`ah compliant life insurance policies at Point of Sale via local banks in the Arabic-speaking and Islamic region. FWU equips these banks in its sales channel with a POS web application that allows quick and trouble-free processing of the necessary insurance and customer data. The POS application has an interface to a transnational, centralized back office that handles the necessary communication between the FWU insurance offices and the banks in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Malaysia and Pakistan. “We decided to go with ConSol* because their software experts examined our, in some cases, very specific requirements in great detail before implementing the processes. The comprehensive and ongoing IT advice we receive has allowed us to expand our activities into further countries in the Arabic-speaking region”, explains Dr. Angela Dirrheimer, who is responsible for IT on the FWU AG board of directors.

For the fifth year running, ConSol* is one of Germany’s best employers

nadine.hoffmann@consol.de — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 16:33:00 +0100

The Munich-based full-service IT provider is one of the top 3 employers among companies with up to 500 employees
For the fifth year running, ConSol*, the Munich-based full-service IT provider for small and medium-sized clients and large corporations, has been ranked among the leaders in the “Germany’s Best Employers” competition. ConSol* impressed in the “Great Place to Work Institute Deutschland” benchmark test as the top employer in the category of companies with up to 500 employees. The distinction was awarded on February 24 at the Ritz Carlton in Berlin, Germany. The presenter at the evening reception was Ursula von der Leyen, German Federal Minister for Labor and Social Affairs. “Given the current crisis, it takes courage for a company to subject itself to the critical judgment of its employees. We are all the more happy to be consistently counted among one of Germany’s top employers,” explained the founder and CEO of ConSol*, Dr. Ulrich Schwanengel. “This competition provides the ideal platform for us to promote ourselves as an attractive employer. It is also an excellent benchmark for us: To what extent have our improvement measures been successful? Where is there more to do? Transparency and openness are of paramount importance for us. Our employees are simply proud to work at a ‘Great Place to Work.’” The ConSol* corporate culture is designed in such a way that people are always at its center. All employees are hired, assessed, and respected simply according to their professional and interpersonal skills. Salaries at ConSol* are not based on gender, instead they are purely performance related. ConSol* promotes the employment of women quietly, without a quota system but pragmatically, which means our policy is much more effective. This commitment is paying off. The company is not only more successful, it is also creating new jobs.
The evaluation
Every year, the Great Place to Work Institute empirically investigates workplace culture according to criteria such as credibility, respect, fairness, pride, and team spirit. As part of this process, 60 individual aspects that determine the relationships between employees and the management, their colleagues, and the company as a whole are examined. The anonymous vote of employees makes up two thirds of the evaluation. The employer’s human resources department must also undergo a comprehensive audit of its workplace culture. This result makes up one third of the evaluation.

Additional links:
www.greatplacetowork.de

AOK Bayern: ConSol*CM with new SAP interface

nadine.hoffmann@consol.de — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 16:42:00 +0100

Quick and easy access to the latest data for enterprise case management AOK Bayern has been successfully working with ConSol* in the areas of medical malpractice and IT service management for many years. At the largest health insurance company in Bavaria, the SAP interface of the company’s specialist application “Malpractice in the Healthcare Sector” is now up and running based on the enterprise case management solution ConSol*CM. The SAP integration became necessary after October 2009 when old customer databases were no longer maintained and SAP began to be used as the central directory service. ConSol*CM supplies the new interface with up-to-date data on policyholders and healthcare providers and thereby enables previously manual processing steps to be automated. In order to connect SAP to ConSol*CM, the Mule Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) was used as a middleware layer. The ESB resolves data on historical health insurance, pension, and healthcare providers, combines the results of several SAP interface requests with data on address, period of coverage, and contract, as well as identification numbers, and converts all of this data into a standardized format. The decoupling of the systems using ESB as a middleware layer, the use of open communication protocols (Web services, JDBC, SMTP) and the transfer of the integration logic into ESB all followed the principles of service-oriented architecture (SOA). This enables the user to react quickly to new requirements in the future, to extend customer data requests to include other data sources, or to replace older systems, without having to modify the business applications involved. “ConSol*CM helped AOK to take the first step towards SOA. From now on, AOK can react to changes flexibly and can sustainably reduce costs in software development", says Peter Schmitt, Senior Executive Manager in Customer Management at Kubus IT, the IT service provider of AOK Bayern. For further information please refer to our complete success story (PDF).

Open Source Monitoring Conference 2009

dalber@consol.de — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 08:32:00 +0100

ConSol*-Nagios-Specialists on site For the fourth time now ConSol* Nagios specialists participated in the OSMC |Open Source Monitoring Conference 2009 on Nagios (formerly "NagiosConference"). The renowned conference offers all those interested in Open Source Monitoring solutions a platform to expand their knowledge of the free monitoring system, especially Nagios, and to the opportunity to exchange experiences with other users and developers. The theme spectrum runs from novice lectures for OS monitoring and Nagios beginners to lectures for Nagios and Open Source monitoring in very large environments or cluster systems, which are directed more to advanced Nagios professionals. The presentation of the first release of the trend-setting Nagios-fork Icinga was the highlight and awaited with suspense. On zdnet.de, Gerhard Laußer, ConSol* employee and author of the new Nagios-practical experience book, gave a first statement.

ConSol* expands line to include virtualization consulting and implementation

nadine.hoffmann@consol.de — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 09:39:00 +0200

New Business Unit "Virtualization" ConSol* is expanding its product range to cover a new business segment. Virtualization, the newly created business unit of the Munich-based VMware partner, offers consulting and implementation services for server and desktop virtualization. Its mission is to improve the efficiency of IT systems while reducing capital and operating costs. This is made possible through higher capacity utilization of hardware resources which, in turn, allows companies to react more flexibly to changing market demands. Virtualization likewise reduces long-term capital and operating costs by, for instance, lowering energy consumption. ConSol* is one of a handful of VMware enterprise implementation and consulting partners. The company has now added the Infrastructure Virtualization competency within its capacity as a VMware partner. Periodic updating of our VMware sales, consulting and technology certification guarantees that we will always provide you with the most recent VMware know-how. Virtualization: More Than Just a Trend “Virtualization is more than just a trend. It represents a new way to lower the cost of utilizing IT resources. Our involvement in this area dates back several years, and we have already successfully completed several related projects. The next logical step to help us round out our product portfolio was to set up a separate business unit that offers high-quality consulting services,” states Christian Botta, project manager for the company’s new Virtualization business unit. “The new business unit combines many years of experience in traditional IT consulting and project management with the latest virtualization know-how. This allows us to offer solutions that meet the exact needs of our customers in terms of efficiency.”

Additional information:

Our complete press release as a PDF.
Virtualization – optimal leveraging of your IT resources
VMware consulting – certified knowledge of the VMware product portfolio

allez! creates sleek new appearance of www.consol.de

nadine.hoffmann@consol.de — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 15:27:00 +0200

Relaunch of the ConSol* web presence Right on time for the beginning of the new business year, the ConSol* websites got a sleek new look: Visual appearance as well as website content and structures were completely revised. allez!, the creative ConSol* subsidiary, created a fresh, modern design and was responsible for the technical realization of the website based on the content management system (CMS) TYPO3. The main objectives of the relaunch were user-friendliness and better possibilities for online contacting. Last but not least, the websites shall be found easier within search engines. "Together with our subsidiary, we modernized our internet presence in record time and made it even more customer-friendly”, said the Marketing Director Isabel Baum. “A new photo series imparts the values, engagement and character of ConSol* at first glance – as well as our core competence:
Enterprising IT.” allez! suggested adopting the photo series with the intention of using a stronger emotional approach to the user and to communicate the company’s messages through associations. The photos represent ConSol* employees “in action”, attending to customers and working on IT, while the customer’s core business goes on without interruption. The photo shootings were taken with real employees in Munich.

Benefits for website users:

Customer-oriented structures, associative linking

The clear, customer-oriented online structure of ConSol*’s portfolio as well as an associative linking of the content across all levels ensure that the interested visitor gets right to the required information.

Simplified contacting

An attractive contact box on each page helps the user to get in contact with the right ConSol* department with minimal effort.
How do you like our new website? Please let us know by e-mail.

ConSol* 7x24 Customer Support: ISO 9001 Certificate with top grades

isabel.baum@consol.de — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 10:20:00 +0200

For the seventh time TÜV South certifies the ConSol* customer support with its 7x24 hour hotline The ConSol* Operating Center received, in the second repeat audit test
by TÜV Management in July, once again the ISO 9001 certificate for
highly professional IT administration and excellent consulting for the operation of customer systems. The new TÜV auditor was especially impressed with:

„ the clarity and efficiency in the processes and course of action“
„the high standing of further training“
„the open and friendly atmosphere in the company, which is carried over to the customers“

He certifies the ConSol* Operating once again that a
professional team works with stable, established processes, open
information flow, and outstanding successes with regard to customer
satisfaction. About the history of ISO certificates at ConSol*:

The certification of ConSol* Operating according to ISO 9001:2000 was
awarded in August 2003 after only eight months handling time.
Both TÜV surveillance audits in 2004 and 2005 were mastered with no problems.
The extensive repeat audit, required after three years, was passed with distinction in July 2006.
In 2007 and 2008, in the scope of the control audit, ConSol* was certified with DIN EN ISO 9001:2000 for high professionalism with stable, established processes.
On the 13th and 14th of July, 2009, a second repeat audit from TÜV South was conducted by a new auditor, done now according to DIN EN ISO 9001:2008. The result: superb ratings.

Please download our certificate (pdf, 294 KB).

ConSol*CM: Powerful Processes in a Life Science Environment

nadine.hoffmann@consol.de — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:42:00 +0200

Save Time, Effort and Money Business in a life science company is determined by extremely heterogeneous processes, e.g., from lab management and QA/QS through to customer relationship management and marketing. In every-day life, this might carry the risks of SOPs which are not really lived, redundant data storage, and too much time used to retrieve data from different fields. The workflow-based software ConSol*CM integrates and optimizes all communication processes in your company, reduces costs, and enhances the performance of your business. ConSol*CM manages your processes in
- Sales / Lead Management
- CRM / Marketing
- Service / Customer Care
- Production
- QA / QS
- Delivery / Shipment Read more in our Solution Flyer.

And Action for the ConSol* Rough Cut Editor

nadine.hoffmann@consol.de — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 10:30:00 +0200

Web based video editing for Final Cut Server During the Munich Film Festival ConSol* presented the Rough Cut Editor (RCE) , a high-performance tool which makes web-based video editing for Final Cut Server possible. The editor receives material from Final Cut Server, starts the rough cut per mouse click and transfers it to Final Cut Pro for the fine cut. The intuitively operable Rough Cut Editor significantly accelerates the video editing workflows. Furthermore, RCE relieves Craft Edit workstations because the pre-cut can be done on inexpensive notebook systems.

The presentation by ConSol*‘s Apple experts was part of a theme night about data based postproduction workflows for film, advertising and news. Modern recording ranges between the digital reflex camera and the high-end film camera. Several consultants showed how to seamlessly integrate Final Cut Studio into these workflows. For more information please refer to our Apple services sites.