Goals
- Complete Sales automation with integrated data flow between Customer Portal (Appian), CRM(Salesforce), Order Management(SAP), Planning & fulfillment systems (Kronos)
- Enable seamless engagement between sales representatives & customer with integration between Customer Portal & Salesforce
- Provide a single single view of orders for planning / resourcing teams for allocation
- Integrate the timesheets submissions for automated billing triggers
Results
- Reduced duplicate efforts for data entry across multiple systems
- Single view of orders helped planning / resourcing teams for efficient assignments
- Timesheet triggers with Kronos integrations enabled timely billing / invoicing
- Integration between Customer Portal & CRM enabled faster communication, complete data capture & easy collaboration
Approach
- Redefined business process for simple but efficient workflow process for all business users
- Defined event triggers from all systems for data publish & push to the downstream systems
- Developed integration layer using Azure Integration Services & Business Process layer using Appian BPM
- Developed intelligent recommendation system for resource assignment based on the skill, availability and other constraints
- Developed integration layer as single source of truth for the service delivery allowing custom reports to be run using PowerBI
Cusomter had implemented multiple COTS (Salesforce CRM, SAP Professional Services, Kronos Dimensions, Workday) systems for different departments in the organization. With no integration or very little integration between systems customer relied often on keying in data manually or FTP data export & import into downstream system for futher processing. This further created a huge gap / time lag with evolving business processes & applications leading to inefficiency in overall service delivery.
With the evolving business process it presented an opportunity for the customer to re-look at the overall process & integrate all systems.
Solution
First step in the solutioning was to re-design the business process to enable cleaner integration between systems with focus on meeting the emerging business needs. Once the business process was finalized we developed a data flow architecture, governance & defined the access policies etc. The data models were then mapped from individual systems along with the identified triggers from the business process flow.
Considering the variety application landscape & organizations intent to move towards Microsoft Azure, we choose Azure Integration Services as the key component for integration. With the business process initiated from the Customer Portal or Salesforce with new request, we used LogicApps & Event Grid as integration layer to capture data before being finally consumed by downstream system. Any activity on the new request in the downstream system was pushed again to LogicApps & consumed by others.
Seamless data exchange between all systems reduced the data inconsistencies, errors there by increasing productivity. Realtime integrations between systems ensured transparency between departments & end customer. Single view of orders for planning & resource team ensured fewer cancellations / reschedules.
With Azure cloud infrastructure we maintained / deployed the solution across multiple regions for high availability. Log Analytics was configured to capture each request & response for detailed analysis if required on error. With the LogicApps ability to re-trigger the request the support teams were able to cleanup / help in case of any errors.
With data flowing into Azure for every request, a central data repository was created with the master keys in Azure SQL. This enabled further reporting using PowerBI for the management.