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.NET Technologies for Construction Company

Executive summary

Our customer is a 100 year old, billion-dollar US based Construction Company providing an extensive selection of bridge, drainage, earth stabilization & storm water solutions. The customer had acquired a number of other companies over past decade and thus had over 40 different applications. ennovate’s engagement with the customer began with supporting their software applications on Microsoft .NET technology.

Gradually, ennovate’s team demonstrated their expertise on Microsoft Technology through pilot projects assigned by the customer and won the confidence of the customer to customize their existing applications. ennovate was also instrumental in saving significant cost in technology investment, by suggesting appropriate Business Intelligence tools for customer requirements.

For past 2 years, ennovate has served as a technology offshoring wing of this construction giant by offering complete IT services in Microsoft technologies like .Net, Biztalk Server, SharePoint Server, PerformancePoint Server, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM & Great Plains.

The Customer

Our customer offers a wide array of innovative solutions for both initial development and rehabilitation of existing structures and sites. Their involvement with products and applications is founded on a century of research and practical field experience. Their products provide effective site solutions for projects with a variety of loading conditions, foundation requirements, soil and water environments as well as varied installation demands.

The Challenge

  •  Over the past 10 years, the customer has acquired several companies across various industries. Consequently, the customer was in a tricky situation of maintaining over 40 applications developed in different technologies including Microsoft .NET.
  • One of the major pains for them was to consolidate and validate data in different formats coming from different applications. With legacy system in place they had created jobs for data consolidation. These jobs were not 100% reliable.
  • Almost 350GB of data resided in multiple servers. Data redundancy and inconsistency was a troublesome part to tackle.
  • Several custom applications were written around the system increasing the complexity business operations and work flow which badly impacted productivity of the staff.

 The Solution

  • ennovate offered support for and maintained all these diverse applications. We studied their business operations and work flow. Our solutions leveraged existing system eliminating small custom applications.
  • We also performed GAP analysis and helped them with our customizations to automate the work flow and to enhance the decision making ability with different views of data.
  • We suggested and implemented Microsoft BizTalk Server for making different applications talk with each other.
  • Our implementation of Microsoft Biztalk Server helped them remove the jobs for data consolidation. It not only removed data redundancy but also delivered accurate data.
  • We implemented a solution with Microsoft SharePoint Server to automate the workflow and easy collaboration of information within and across the departments.
  • We also implemented Microsoft Dynamics CRM & Great Plains (GP) for them. 
  • We helped them with employing Business Intelligence (BI) solutions. Our consultation on right choice of BI tools helped them with significant cost saving in IT infrastructure.
  • One of the major challenges for us while customizing and fine tuning their applications from acquisitions was absence of documents. We had to study their work patterns and at some places reverse engineer the code to understand the need and utilization of functions. Along with our support for these applications we prepared the documents for these applications as well. This initiative was appreciated by the customer.

The Technology

  •  Microsoft .NET
  • Microsoft BizTalk Server
  • Microsoft SharePoint Server
  • Microsoft PerformancePoint Server
  • Business Intelligence
    • Hyperion
    • Microsoft SQL Server BI tools
  • Microsoft Dynamics
    • Microsoft Dynamics CRM
    • Microsoft Dynamics GP
  • Databases
    • SQL Server 2000
    • SQL Server 2005
    • Access
    • FoxPro
     

The Benefits

  •  Smooth work flows and increased efficiency of the staff
  • Minimum changes to existing way of working and ease of use
  • Efficient data management with central repository for data from all legacy applications
  • Better decision making for top management with variety of insightful reports
  • Improvement in response time with automated process
  • Removed dependencies by creating documentation and application workflow

Customer Testimonial

"I am extremely happy with our relationship with ennovate Technologies. They staffed us with highest quality consultants, both on-site and offshore. We have initially started using them on our maintenance projects, which quickly expanded to development and strategic projects.  Flexibility, commitment to service and attention to detail, they offer is going to further expand this relationship.  I would recommend them to any small to mid-size company"

-       IT Vice President