With personnel number 01, Dana was the very first employee at ivoflow. She joined as a working student in October 2020 and has been on board full-time since 2022. For Dana, software development is more than just 0 and 1. Over the past 4 years, she has learned a lot about procurement and developed one of the main modules in the software: the Cost Savings Toolbox. Here, the 28-year-old talks about savings potential, currencies and what she likes about ivoflow.
What does your professional career look like/what did you do before ivoflow?
I was a student before and worked as a working student in some software jobs where I designed and implemented a tool to support the automatic reading of invoices as images or PDFs and extracting its important data and assisted in defining software specifications.
Why did you want to become part of the ivoflow team?
The idea of ivoflow sounded interesting and since there are always a lot of new features to implement, it never gets boring.
What are your tasks at ivoflow?
I work as a Backend Developer at ivoflow meaning I help in designing the app’s architecture and structure and implement the functionality and algorithms of the app e.g. how we calculate the saving initiatives .
Which project have you enjoyed the most?
Right at the beginning, after the general structure of the app was done, I started to implement the algorithms behind the saving initiatives like LPP, Currency or Dual Sourcing initiatives which required thinking not only about how those savings are calculated (because we had to make sure everything is correctly calculated considering different currencies, different units and more) but also how to make it performant on big data. But once everything was done and the saving initiatives were shown in the App, it felt like a huge achievement since it is one of the main features of our App.
Which project was challenging and why?
The Market Intelligence Tool was quite challenging as a project because it required a whole new structure and functionality with lots of cases to consider. For example, the user can assign indices like raw material or energy costs on different levels which influences level beneath e.g. the user assigns a raw material to a top level category, all categories below and parts belonging to categories below should inherit this raw material but only if they do not have their own assignments of indices already. The saving initiative based on those index assignments must be kept up to date with every change as well. Another challenging point of this tool was the algorithm calculating the saving initiative of the combined index for one part because there can be different baseline dates per index, different part prices in different currencies over time and more which must be considered when combining all indices to one.
Is there an exciting project you are currently working on?
We are currently developing a CO2 Tool in cooperation with sustamize to show users not only how much costs they can save but also how much co2 emissions they can possibly reduce – by estimating the co2 emissions per part. Based on those we also calculate the emissions per category and supplier to give users an overview of their parts/suppliers/categories with the highest emission.
What do you like best about your work?
I like the nice team and that the work is versatile since there are always new features/improvements to come that are different and require you to think about the design and structure.
Describe ivoflow with 3 emojis.
🚀🤔💹
If you could only eat one type of food for the rest of your life, what would it be?
Ghormeh Sabzi (persian herb stew) with rice
Which fictional universe (from books, movies, games) would you like to visit?
I would like to live in the world of Avatar –The last Airbender so I could be a water, fire, earth or air bender and fly on a sky bison because I think that would be a lot of fun.
What superpower would you like to have?
Teleportation which would make it easy to travel to different places fast while saving money and time.
