Situation

Legacy systems, manual tools, and processes getting in the way of the Government Ministry’s mission
The Ministry of Economic Development (MED) aims to foster New Zealand’s economic development and employs 750 people in eight branches across New Zealand, covering a range of economic activities from strategy to consumer affairs.

The Ministry of Consumer Affairs and the Ministry of Tourism are both semiautonomous and are part of the MED. The MED is made up of many branches and departments, each with its own unique goals, processes, and datasets.

Increasing demand for solutions that provide recording, managing, tracking, reporting, and simplified workflow together with meeting legislative requirements has resulted in a constant flow of requests from work team managers for business applications to manage data more effectively and efficiently.

Within the Ministry, employees typically work in units that require distinct applications and associated workflows. A challenge common to each group is the need to produce regular reports back to Government Ministers. Because of aging legacy systems, data residing in silos, multiple spreadsheets, and numerous paper files, in some cases, days of effort was required to compile these reports.

Another challenge faced by the MED was the proliferation of hundreds of disparate databases. Over the years, many single-user data stores, such as Access, Paradox, and SQL databases, mushroomed across MED, making it difficult to capture and share data between departments and work teams. The discrete data stores also hampered collation of information that managers could use to quickly make informed decisions about new policies or initiatives.

One framework, many applications
Seeking to solve data access problems, work teams turned to the IT department. Soon, the Business Analyst team was fielding a long list of custom application requests. “As the team’s understanding of the xRM application development framework grew, it became clear that it offered us a highly flexible and customizable development framework and a solution for a significant proportion of our team’s varying requirements,” says John Beckford, Information Technology Group, Software Development & Support Manager for the MED.

The Ministry of Consumer Affairs (MCA) had already implemented Microsoft Dynamics CRM, so MED IT leaders were familiar with the ease, power, and flexibility of xRM.

When MED’s Energy Safety team requested a case management application with similar characteristics to MCA’s solution, the IT managers again turned to xRM and added the Energy Safety Intelligence (ESI) application to the framework in Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

“The workflow, tracking, and interface requirements were similar to those developed for the Ministry of Consumer Affairs,” recalls John. “Since we already had the xRM framework in place and were aware of the effort required to create applications, we compared up-and-coming projects with other technology in use at the MED and figured it would be cheaper and quicker to use Microsoft Dynamics CRM for the ESI as well.”

Accelerated development while meeting specialized business needs
By using familiar Microsoft application framework building blocks to create multiple applications on a single platform, the MED has increased end-user efficiency while simultaneously reducing IT development and ensuing support costs.

Early on, the MED IT team established an assessment process for new business applications, which helped identify those that could easily be delivered via Microsoft Dynamics CRM. A high-level data model and basic workflows, together with a list of customization requirements, provide a good indication.

Typically, a suitable business application can be modeled to prototype stage in about 60 hours, enabling the business users to “experience” their new system through screen interactions and basic workflow.

“Once we’d become comfortable with the strengths of Microsoft Dynamics CRM and which business requirements it could easily deliver we were surprised as to the percentage of application requests for which it was the optimum solution,” recalls Beckford.

To date, the MED has implemented five unique applications built on the xRM framework:

• Consumer Affairs Reporting Tool. A dynamic, unified database to capture all information relating to product standards and product safety issues.

• Energy Safety Intelligence. A common database incorporating workflow automation to support all operations, including the capture of incident data, management of open investigations, audits, and compliance activities.

• Grants Information Management System. A case management system to store and administer citizen grant applications submitted to one or more of the MED’s eight grant funds.

• MED Contracts. To store, share, and monitor all contracts for goods and services.

• Future Competitive Advantage. To maintain detailed profiles, business development plans, and product/export portfolios of New Zealand’s business movers and shakers.

In addition, the MED IT team has five new line-of-business applications on the xRM framework underway, including a Hazardous Waste Permits application to manage international permit approval processes and a tool for MED’s legal team for managing their case work.

Benefits

The xRM Framework IT benefits
“The xRM development framework is helping us to standardize a subset of our systems and databases, which makes them easier to maintain and allows data to be shared among systems and teams,” says Beckford. ”Ultimately, that’s given us significant savings in setup and development costs because we don’t need infrastructure and architecture resources each time we develop a new application.”

The Microsoft Dynamics xRM Framework benefits to the business
“Using the xRM development framework is quicker as nondeveloper resources are able to customize it for their needs,” explains Beckford. ”This means we’re able to be much more responsive to our internal customers, saving time and money and resulting in more agile business processes.”

The major business benefits across the MED are:
• Rapid development means application delivery in weeks versus months.

• Proactive business intelligence tools promote timely, dynamic program initiatives.

• Multiple databases have been replaced with standardized business-unit databases.

• Lower risk with leading-edge records management system.
• Replace antiquated data systems that, in some cases, are no longer supported, and now have complete data backup and protection policies.

Specific line-of-business application benefits
Feedback from the departments these applications have been developed for has been very positive, with clear benefits seen by the users. “The Energy Safety Intelligence application is an essential tool to help us manage our department proactively and ensure we best serve public safety,” says Mark Wogan, Operations Manager for Energy Safety at MED.

“Now, I can run reports encompassing both our electricity and gas workgroups and identify safety incident trends more effectively to create education and prevention programs,” says Wogan.

Other benefits for Wogan and his team include:
• A unified database so that managers can drill down to the employee level to monitor activities and performance and provide guidance as needed.

• Robust data-search capabilities to facilitate the identification of safety trends.

• Reduced report preparation time (from days to hours).

• Improved productivity and collaboration. The Grant Information Management System has replaced eight separate systems, meaning managers are now able to closely manage the entire NZ$17 million grant budget from one system.

“Our Grant Information Management System provides a highly efficient and standardized tool to run the eight grant program we’re responsible for,” says Abbey Cheeseman, Administrator for Grant Funding at the MED.

“Workflows calculate payments to recipients based on established milestones to ensure compliance with grant terms, and a 360-degree view of the program’s spending ensures we don’t overspend or underspend grant funds,” says Cheeseman. “Centralization of applicant data also reduces the risk of fraud by applicants.”

Overall, the line-of-business applications on the xRM application framework have boosted employee productivity at the MED by standardizing data-capture requirements, integrating databases, allowing comprehensive reports to be produced in hours instead of days, and giving employees access to accurate data in one location that can be easily managed. 
 
MED works with a number of partners to develop and maintain its business applications. The CRM applications in this story have been developed in conjunction with Intergen.

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