Background
Talent Technologies are a team of organisational psychologists who help companies select, develop and retain their investment in human resources through the provision of psychometric evaluation services. They have offices in Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne and Auckland. They have developed advanced business processes over years of operation in co-ordinating scheduling, testing and report writing staff, but increasing pressure from customers to reduce turn-around times led them to look at automation.
Talent Technologies wanted to retain their investment in business process but
improve visibility and shorten lead times. They needed to ensure service level
agreements (SLAs) were being met and that appropriate escalation measures were
taken when SLAs were threatened. To achieve this Talent Technologies required a
system that was:
- Thin client - to easily reach remote offices and
out-of-office staff and to ease IT administration
- Extensible - so that new processes could be
incorporated over time to take advantage of automation features
- Low maintenance - to minimise the overhead on
internal IT resources
- Intuitive - to minimise the learning curve
- Affordable - to allow as many users to be connected
to the system for the lowest TCO possible
Additional requirements extended to the maintenance of timesheet data, the
scheduling of resources based on skills to particular tasks, and management
level reporting showing the distribution of effort by the various resources
which could be further broken down by client.
Project Overview
5 Limes developed a solution that utilised
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 for its workflow and customisation capabilities,
combined with highly competitive pricing on the Microsoft Windows 2003 Small
Business Server operating system. We customised several aspects of Dynamics CRM
including creating workflow and escalation rules, new security roles and
privileges, custom entities along with requisite screens and list views, and
custom reports.
Additionally casual user functions, such as timesheet recording, utilise
custom-made web pages that record their data directly into Dynamics CRM via the
Dynamics API, minimising the number of Client Access Licenses required and
helping to keep the costs down. Remote users interact with the system using
emails connected to custom-made web services that provide interactivity when
email communication is the only option.
5 Limes provided consulting and support during
the migration of Talent’s existing Windows Server infrastructure to consolidate
and take advantage of new capabilities afforded by Windows 2003 Small Business
Server, which included the migration of their existing business data and
Exchange email systems. This was accomplished in a short time outside normal
business hours to ensure minimal disruption to the business.
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