ABOUT CUSTOMER

Innovative Employee Solutions (IES) is a leading provider of contingent workforce solutions, specializing in Payrolling and Independent Contractor Compliance services. Founded in 1974 in San Diego, CA, IES is a woman-owned woman-operated company certified by the WBENC. IES has partnered with over 22,000 companies to offer cost-savings and risk mitigation with their pre-identified contract talent. IES offers services world-wide, in over 150 countries globally and across the industries, including IT, Software, Defence, Media, Finance and more.

Application Requirements

IES was using Microsoft Dynamics CRM 365 as their primary software for customer engagement, customer relationship and invoicing etc. The core business processes of IES included screening of contractors, 3rd party verifications, onboarding of contracts and contractors, generating invoices and maintaining wage bills and payments. Microsoft Dynamics CRM had been heavily used for ensuring critical business processes are effectively run.
IES also used Dynamics CRM Portal, which comes by default with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 365. Dynamics Portals give a value addition to businesses by providing non-CRM users or management / executives to view and get information via a web portal. This reduces use of too many Microsoft Dynamics CRM 365 users, as well as prohibiting non-required CRM users to access business critical information. However, Dynamics Portal costs per-user which is a costly recurring affair. IES wanted to decouple the Dynamics Portal by replacing it with a custom-built web app, which will have full integration of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 365.

The Business Case Challenge

The project requirements encompassed detailed study of the existing Microsoft Dynamics CRM 365 Portal features, and all the APIs that interwork with Dynamics CRM 365. And then design, develop a stand-alone, independent web portal which will replace the Dynamics CRM Customer Portal. IES not only wished all existing features are inherited, but also a new Dashboard and a set of additional functionalities. The Dashboard would have intuitive graphs and insights, based on customer data residing inside Microsoft Dynamics CRM 365. The most important challenge is to understand what all APIs of Dynamics 365 CRM were used and how to replicate them. And then for dashboard, graphs and new functionalities, finding out what all APIs and services are available inside Microsoft Dynamics CRM 365.

Blue Summit’s Solution

Setting up the right project team was the first step. Blue Summit added Microsoft Dynamics CRM 365 specialists, and MEAN Stack based cloud application developers, QA specialists into the project team. A Microsoft Dynamics CRM 365 Solution Architect was also onboarded. Later on couple of mobile app developers also included into the team, to provide mobility to the customer portal users.
The Microsoft Dynamics CRM 365 developers listed out the CRM APIs, and the MEAN Stack developers built a custom set of web API libraries layer to overcome the connectivity challenge in synchronizing the front-end mobile apps and between the web back-end plus CRM Solution. The custom portal utilized it’s Angular front-end, NodeJS backend and team included several 3rd party libraries that do different business functions. The major hurdle of ensuring performance and high security because of exposure of several APIs are taken care of by utilizing standard libraries and modularizing the architecture. High availability and scalability are ensured using Tier-4 Cloud deployment and taking in use some of the most advanced deployment features available in cloud infrastructure. Security challenges are distinctly different for iOS, Android and web sub systems and are thoroughly grilled to support the platform required security measures.

There are several new features on top of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 365 Customer Portal are implemented. Team worked with 3rd party providers to integrate their libraries / APIs to perform specific business functions, some of them are listed below-

• Accelitas – Bank Routing Verification
• Daxtra – Resume Parsing
• DocuSign – Electronic Signature and Agreement Cloud
• ipify – Public IP Address API

The solution also required to query and fetch information back and forth from Microsoft Dynamics CRM 365 and then distribute the information across sub-systems to deliver as per customer device or application front-end. This had it’s intrinsic challenge to maintain data structure and processing overhead. To build the seamless interworking, architecture and design was visualized considering the max no of concurrent users, database handling capabilities well before the product platform construction phase. Thereby eliminating any processing or memory bottlenecks during the implementation phases.

Result

The project met all of it’s objectives, achieving all 3 major goals within timeline and without any discomfort of a typical migration project. The first major goal was the decouple customer portal away from Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM. We achieved this, and thereby saving thousands of dollars recurring subscription cost. The second goal was to enable business-critical functionalities within the custom-built web portal. We achieved it by a seamless integration and interworking with several leading 3rd parties. Some of the core features like resume parsing, bank account verification etc. were enabled in automated fashion. The 3rd goal was to provide intuitive dashboard and summary data insights.
The project was executed over 9 months, resulting in a fully functional stand-alone custom web portal, fully migrated away from MS Dynamics CRM. Additional functionalities via integration of 3rd parties, an integrated dashboard and portal fully interworking with Dynamics CRM via it’s APIs. IES is able to save thousands of dollars every year on subscription cost, as well as benefitted with a set of new functionalities and integrations that were not possible while being inside tightly-couple Dynamics Portal.