Business Process Reengineering

A young energy technology and consulting firm that evaluates, designs, and implements innovative and environmentally responsible energy solutions to help companies reduce their energy demand is experiencing sudden and rapid growth fueled by the trend to "go green" and further by utility companies offering incentives to small businesses to reduce their energy consumption. Proposals they prepare for their clients begin with a detailed audit of the lighting systems throughout the business facility and include recommendations for energy-saving alternatives with an analysis of the cost-savings to be achieved. When a client opts to proceed with the implementation, the company manages the entire project through to completion.

The original process for tracking and managing sales, audits and projects relied on multiple people using several disparate systems including, National Grid’s InDemand system (InDemand), ACT!, QuickBooks and various MS Excel spreadsheets. The company has a reputation for innovation and technical excellence and its leadership sought to replace the hodge-podge of systems with an innovative solution worthy of its reputation.

Softer Ingenuity was engaged to perform a business process analysis and to develop a functional specification for a web-based application with a centralized database that would eliminate the need for ACT!, MS Excel and that would be able to integrate with QuickBooks and InDemand. Softer Ingenuity interviewed executives, managers and staff to document the existing business process, identify project goals and functional roles; reviewed functionality of complex auditing spreadsheets; and documented business rules and use cases. The deliverable was a 70 page document that included an overview of the business needs; a description of the key project goals; a Business Rules Catalog; a section on role-based application security; Use Cases describing how a user interacts with the system to achieve a particular task; "as is" and "to be" business process diagrams using Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN); Wire Frame mockups of key web pages to illustrate functionality and information flow of the interface to stakeholders and software developers; and a overview of future considerations for enhancement and integration with external systems, such as QuickBooks.