iSystemz

Key Challenges
Any event within the framework of a business is more than just a single action - it is designed to develop, concretize and emphasize close and distant goals, open prospects and ways of their implementation. The objectives of any event are:

• exchange of professional experience;

• employee training;

• demonstration of ideas, values and content of the company’s work;

• formation of the company’s business image;

• as well as attracting new clients and partners.

Our company always sets realistic deadlines, without creating unrealistic deadlines and without delaying the dead-line. This project included several stages of creation:

1. Event planning: goals, objectives, format (conferences, seminars, dealer events, business forums, round tables, professional and industry exhibitions, business receptions and trainings).

2. Hosting an event.

3. Disclosure of the work done to the state. This stage can be called the most responsible. All pharmaceutical companies, due to the fact that they deal with people's lives and public health, are strictly regulated by the state. At the end of its work, the company must report on the activities carried out and make all their data open. All this is carried out thanks to the work of our platform and its integration with various platforms in an automatic mode, when all the necessary data is received by government agencies.

All stages of planning are integrated with more than a dozen different systems: payroll accounting, HR, marketing system, etc.

Subsequently, the system was refined and polished for about two years until it worked perfectly, when all wishes were taken into account.

After the system successfully passed the active launch stage, it was supported and refined by a team of 1 developer and 2 technical support people. In 2021, the functioning of the project and platform was completely transferred to the customer, which allows him to currently provide technical support and implement his solutions without involving iSystemz developers.

4finance
iSystemz experts implemented a flexible procurement and contract management system for 4finance

Key Challenges
4finance needed to transfer and optimize the existing processes of work with contracts, purchase orders, invoices, suppliers etc from the existing system to SharePoint Online. 4finance’s current system was not ergonomic, complicated for users and did not allow employees to react quickly to the organizational changes in the company. In addition, it was necessary to implement the ability to work with the system online and conduct approvals via email. 4finance needed to implement a convenient, intuitive system with the possibility of flexible configuration and a transparent approval process.

Solution
Office 365 and SharePoint Online were chosen as the platform for the task, as well as the line of ZForms and ZFlow products for fast low-code process automation in Office 365.

Despite much experience in implementing highly loaded enterprise-level systems based on SharePoint and SharePoint Online, the task turned out to be very non-trivial taking into account the customer's requirements.

Through the 9 month duration of the design, build and implementation, we worked collaboratives with 4finance, taking into consideration the complexities of this business, such as business-processes unification that reflected the specific legislation, multi-currency accounting, complex pricing and organizational structure in each country of it operates in.

One of the key aspects of automation was integrating complex document approval workflow based on complicated approval matrix, variety of routes for different legal entities, dependence on approval limits and other criteria and a lot of exceptions, into the new system process.

To simplify the administration of the complex system of roles, many processes of managing the organizational structure, roles and access rights have been automated. A mechanism was created to automatically create system roles and assign them the required access rights when creating elements in the system, on which the role depends. For example, when a new legal entity is created in the system, the following roles are automatically created for it: lawyer, accountant, document management specialist, financial director and country manager or subsidiary manager, and so on. At the same time, it is possible to create the necessary roles with customizable access rights manually.

An important business requirement was the ability to adjust document approval routes without involving developers and system administrators. To implement this requirement a system of directories was created, allowing the creation of common routes for a group of legal entities, the routes for which are more or less similar, and to specify exceptions for individual legal entities. The directories are managed by a group of responsible employees from the business unit.

Having completed the first phase of the project and the implementation of the system, the project team began to study the product and opportunities for improvement. Taking into account the growth of data volume, implementation of new modules, complex system of access to documents and known limitations of SharePoint – it was decided to optimize the second project phase and move away from the classic architecture solution of SharePoint Server to SharePoint Online. After analyzing and testing alternative scenarios, with increasing load on the key components of the system, a non-standard solution was found - modernization of the system architecture and transfer of the most complex modules to hybrid data storage.

In order to ensure continuity of the system during the transition to the hybrid scheme, an iterative approach was applied that allowed to regularly reduce the load on SharePoint. The first step was the migration of archived data. Data from SharePoint lists was transferred to a structured storage based on SQL Server deployed in the 4finance infrastructure, with subsequent module-by-module transfer of functionality to the new schema.

The transition to the hybrid scheme significantly increased the speed of the system, provided additional opportunities for building reports by means of direct access (summary tables in Excel, reports in Power BI) and implemented specialized mechanisms for interaction with the data in its own database. This solution not only made it possible to achieve the set objectives but also increased the work efficiency while preserving the key features of SharePoint Online: file sharing, versioning, process logic based on the SharePoint Online process engine.