ICE Case Study: Initial Consulting Engagements

The Company

As a publicly traded leader in the electronic design and semiconductor industry, this company’s technology is widely used by customers around the globe.

The Situation

The company maintains a substantial database of resources to support customers in using their technology. This information is accessible to customers via an online portal and contains documentation, software downloads, and a searchable knowledgebase that provides solutions to frequently encountered problems. This portal also contains training on new products, updates, and best practices.

When the company contacted Zia to review their project, the resource database utilized proprietary technology for content management connected to a separate ERP system for managing support tickets. The company needed a better way to integrate their support system with their website and the resource database. Additionally, they did not have any business intelligence tools to gauge the value of the content to the customer.

The Process

Zia Consulting began the project with a Discovery and Process Assessment, the first phase of all Initial Consulting Engagements (ICE). They learned about the company’s business—what currently works for them and where process improvements could be made.

This process of research and analysis allowed Zia to realize from a business perspective how an ECM system could help the customer. It was clear that the company had challenges managing new content creation, tracking approval and publishing processes, and relaying information back to the support team.

The Discovery and Process Assessment phase was beneficial in allowing Zia to then have a more technical understanding of how to implement the right solution for the customer—moving into the second phase of most ICE, the Technical Assessment. Zia discovered which features and functions of an ECM system would need to be applied to meet the customer’s needs. The solution design needed to include deployment topology, high availability, disaster recovery, backup and restore capabilities, and detailed integration with the website, ERP, and business intelligence tools.

The Solution

After gaining a strong understanding of the business requirements and technology needs of the company, Zia was ready to build a solution that could address both areas and be delivered in a set amount of time.

Zia customized Alfresco to manage the workflow and release of resource assets and utilized Mulesoft to connect the company’s existing ERP system to Alfresco and Jaspersoft BI.

Because of the thorough documentation provided by Zia, the company was confident the project would be successfully implemented and launch on time and on budget.  For this project, Zia acted as the lead on development, working with the company’s existing team. The approach taken was very iterative (agile). The team worked in short sprints, continually adding value to the project as it was delivered. Zia was not locked into the original blueprint of the Discovery, but leveraged that work throughout the entire iterative process.

The Results

Upon project implementation, the company’s customers were able to easily login to the website and quickly access support documentation. This support system was fully integrated with the website and content.  The project improved the velocity of newly published articles and richer content in the portal. The workflow statistics and article statistics provided intelligence to move/release content quicker and react to patterns in support issues.

On the back end, the company is able to see which resources are most often viewed, which are deemed most helpful, and which are not. From this information, the company is able to produce more helpful materials for the website, ultimately decreasing the number of support tickets they receive as customers are able to help themselves.

From beginning to end, the project took approximately nine months. As Zia maintained transparency throughout the project, the team was able to learn about the products and solutions being implemented. They are now able to make changes to the system on their own based our Zia’s experience and best practices—so they are not locked into their solution provider. Because of the success of this project, the company continues to engage with Zia on other projects focused on content management.