Fluent Technology

Extern is a charity working directly with children, adults and communities affected by social exclusion throughout Ireland. Extern began by working mainly with ex-offenders; this work continues today however the majority of their work is now with children and families.

Requirements
Extern has grown rapidly in the past few years and now employ over 400 people with offices throughout Ireland. Extern came out to tender in order to find an IT management system that showed evidence of their past and current successes working with vulnerable adults and children, this was something they found difficult in the past.

They needed to introduce a sophisticated management information system that would increase competitiveness, demonstrate value for money and most importantly show the value of their service to stakeholders and policy makers. Extern wanted a qualitative as well as a quantitative Management Information System that would enable them to become the agency of choice.

Solution
Fluent Technology developed a web based Management Information System based on their BASIS framework for the Extern organisation. The innovative BASIS framework enables the rapid development of highly flexible and sophisticated software solutions. It was essential that the system put in place met Externs requirements. This was done by continuous communication between Fluent and Extern staff in order to make the integration of the new technology as seamless as possible.

Stages in the process involved spending time within the organisation running a series of business process works shops to gain a deep understanding of the day to day running of the business; this ensured a seamless integration with the technology and a more improved standardised set of business processes. Throughout the development phase Fluent Technology ran a series of workshops with a broad range of staff members in order to ensure the developed system was fit for purpose and to enable the staff to communicate any concerns or suggestions.

Value
The result was a solution that provided the following benefits:

• Streamlines the workflow associated with reporting on project activity and ensuring greater validation is captured
• Ability to share business functions throughout each office such as incident reporting.
• Decreases the time spent on administrative functions such as producing reports and more time spent reviewing reports.
• Reduces the dependence on paper
• Ensures greater consistency of project delivery and approach across all Extern projects
• Greater trend analysis and knowledge to support future tender opportunities
• Capture and react more quickly to customer feedback
• Measure return oninvestment
• Manage their resources more effectively and carry out cost benefit analysis

The solution was built with the below technologies:

• Microsoft SQL Server, & Reporting Services
• Microsoft Windows 2003 Server
• Microsoft.NET Framework, Visual Studio, VB.NET
• Microsoft Click Once Deployment
• Mobile device integration (Blackberry)

Since the implementation of the software Extern has seen many benefits including a more efficient service to clients and a more effective internally managed workload.

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