Subscribe to Optaros RSS feedREFEN is a State of Vaud (south west of Switzerland) project that we delivered yesterday to our client to his great satisfaction. The enthusiasm of the customer was clearly expressed on the day we delivered the solution ahead of time. We succeeded in a short period of time in analyzing and gathering business processes in a user-centric way in order to fulfill end-users needs and thus improve the quality and efficiency of their work.
REFEN is a customized SugarCRM OS 4.5.1 based solution which will be used by the work regulation enforcement office of the State of Vaud : “SDE”. The SDE’s everyday tasks include controlling work conditions in Swiss and foreign companies located on the State of Vaud territory, approving industrial building constructions, providing foreigners with work permit and enforcing work security regulations. Inspectors are sent out to visit companies, during these visits, they gather data about the company that will be stored in a MySQL 5.2 database through the REFEN interface. Dynamic (jQuery based) customized forms help them record required detailed information. Fraud will result in fines that the solution can format and feed via XML files to an external billing application.
The main challenge of this project was to heavily customize forms in order to allow the SDE record the detailed information it needs. This resulted in a 280 fields form regarding “visits” and another 120 fields form for companies. As forms were becoming overcrowded and ergonomic was declining, we decided to implement some javascript to add dynamic and create a user centric interface. We used the jQuery library which proved to be useful and interesting but very difficult to optimize for IE6. We mainly used the original SugarCRM modules to achieve these results. The “account” module was used for companies and “opportunities” for visits. Other modules were used “out of the box” such as contact, task, time management. We developed a new module in order to be able to include some business processes which couldn’t be implemented in a natural CRM dataflow as well as 2 plug-ins (based on community ideas) in order to add some more specific functionalities like:
- Communication boards displayed on everybody’s homepage, centrally managed by the office’s managers
- A merge dictionary that helps create word documents based on templates which contain tags. When a document is created from a company or visit file, the tags are replaced by data related to the current file.
Finally we integrated the SugarCRM solution in the state of Vaud environment which includes:
- An cross-department Alfresco storage solution (also implemented by Optaros). We use this solution to store the MS-Word documents created. This allows us to perform body search within documents.
- A billing software : Procofiev. This solution reads XML files and produces bills based on the information sent from REFEN.
- A master database (Oracle) containing companies which we update our own DB with. This database contains basic information regarding companies, the REFEN database itself contains 80% more information specific to the SDE.
- A security portal based on IAM. This tool grants access to REFEN based on users groups. This is entirely separated from REFEN as it works as a security portal displaying shortcuts to applications that the user is entitled to use.
REFEN was a very exciting project, due to its nature and to the complexity of the business processes it needed to be extremely user centric.
The OPTAM approach used during this project helped us quickly comprehend the challenges hidden behind the use cases in order to deliver in a record time frame an optimized tool ameliorating the information workflows across the SDE administration and thus ameliorating the department’s ability to enforce work regulation and protect workers.