HOW WE DO IT - Case Studies

A leading professional services firm 

For this leading professional services firm, effective invoicing, contract management and consultant time tracking are critical to organizational success and efficiency. Separate invoicing and time tracking applications, as well as a manual contract management process were creating a division of function and a bottleneck to administrative efficiency. Lack of time resulted in interdepartmental miscommunications and incomplete information transfer which, in turn, was creating a sense of frustration for all involved. It was realized that integration of the two applications could remedy the situation—improved workflow and optimized data integrity could be achieved with a streamlined, automated flow between business processes.  

The Quadrus team analyzed the current processes used by each department to identify the current business workflow and touch points. The team then reviewed the information collected, refined it and returned with valuable insights to make the processes more streamlined and maintainable. The team worked closely with key business analysts to understand the existing application infrastructure to ensure it was being properly leveraged and would fit with current organizational procedures. The solution utilized Microsoft BizTalk Server and its extensive integration framework to automate the integration of the applications and orchestrate the workflow. Where manual processing is required, the solution leveraged BizTalk Messaging for automatic email notification and templates to encourage timely communication. Custom components were created to facilitate varied application input formats while enabling robustness and extensibility. XLang schedules were designed and customized for specific workflow and transactional needs. Also, XML schemas were defined for enterprise data and relationships using BizTalk Editor.  

The integration of these two business processes has resulted in greater leveraging of time and people resources. Work reminders are automatically pushed to people, reducing their reliance on others and, as a result, everyone is working more efficiently. The automated orchestration not only provides more structure to the process, but also offers the ability to create documentation quickly and easily for future reference or knowledge transfer. Additional data validation and fault tolerance were also introduced to ensure that the data flowing between departments is indeed accurate.