The Gratex KowledgeOffice.NET provided Arca Capital with a solution to manage projects and computerize standard work processes, allowing for the definition of various types of documents, their workflow and approval processes. It provides several search levels and predefined adjustable reports.

Arca Capital Slovakia was established in 2003, however, it has been active on the Slovak capital market since 1994. From a securities broker, it moved to the implementation its of own investment ideas, mainly in private equity concentrated on venture capital.

Situation

Arca Capital decided to implement a project management and work process support system since it lacked an application to manage financial and investment projects. It also lacked an electronic register of standard workflows (e.g. employee attendance, list of customers, cash flow planning). The project agenda was done in Microsoft Office documents and shared in server folders. Over time it proved to be problematic to maintain the agenda in this manner, maintain good orientation in it and search effectively. Despite introduced standards, documents and work procedures were not formally uniform and the access rights to individual documents or parts thereof were not maintained correctly. The workflow of certain documents (e.g. authorization, voting) was hard to implement, as was informing the users of additions and modifications to documents and changes of their status. The responsibility for informing was with the user who performed the change. It happened that the user forgot or failed to inform all to whom the change related. Communication was done by e-mail. Overviews and statistics were prepared manually. Access to information outside the branch office was not available.

Looking for a suitable product and supplier, the company faced two problems: the nature of project management did not allow for an off the self product, while the costs and time necessary for a tailor-made application were unacceptable.

Business Aims

Besides basic expectations related to the introduction of information technologies, such as the reduction of paperwork, improvement of speed and efficiency of management processes and the centralization of information, Arca Capital had more specific expectations.

The solution had to be open to changes that were not to be time consuming or expensive so that needs, based on experience, could be easily adapted into the application. The application should provide a pleasant and well-arranged user interface. Functions for information searches and definitions of overviews and statistics were required as well.

The application should reflect the organizational hierarchy, the simple definable approval mechanisms and use the existing user accounts (because of the simple administration and user comfort). Each user should have a technological option to be notified by e-mail of relevant events occurring in the agenda. An opportunity to attach attachments of various types to the documents in the application was also required. The safety of the documents stored and making the information therein available according to the positions in project or organizational hierarchy were among the most important required functionalities. The application was to be easy to integrate with other information systems of the customer or their partners.

Solution

Gratex KnowledgeOffice.NET consists of the basic environment for workflow and the user application interface based on WindowsForms.

The following document types have been included in the implementation:

• Projects
• Business opportunities
• Project activities
• Project tasks
• Project problems
• Project documents
• Planned project cash flow
• Project cash flow
• Project profit
• Notes
• Media monitoring
• List of customers
• Work attendance register
• Business trip register

The intention was to create a system allowing for simple definition of documents, their interlinkage, definition of the relevant workflow and approval processes. These characteristics of the system fulfilled the requirement for adaptability to changes, low costs and short implementation time.

The application provides a pleasant and adaptable user interface with the option to adjust views to administrated agendas either centrally according to position or by the user themselves. Two search levels – simple and advanced – are available to the user. The search fulfills much wider requirements, including the full-text search reflecting, additionally, the Knowledge Management requirements. This makes the search for documents easier and more targeted. The search criteria can be saved, reused and shared among users. Settings have been predefined for the customer that can be further adjusted and modified; new settings can be created according to specific needs of the company.

Any of the standard authentication methods supported by Windows can be used to connect to the application server. Besides its own users, the application can be used by users of Active Directory Services, providing for satisfaction of the requirement that current user accounts be used. Organizational hierarchy can be defined to these accounts.

The notification system allows the administrator to set e-mail notifications upon changes of document status as well as comments defined by individual users. An e-mail box is used for the monitoring of events.

Authorization can be specified for individual document types. When setting the access authorizations, it is possible to refer to the organizational structure or any other created structure of the users – employees. Similarly, approval mechanisms for documents can be defined. Documents can be attached to other documents as attachments e.g. Microsoft Office documents.

The requirement for remote and safe connection has been implemented by connection to the application server via a secure channel. A higher level of security can be achieved through forcing authentication and authorization of a client certificate. Information can be safely accessed from any location connected to the internet.

The application is open to integration with other information systems (without the necessity of reprogramming the application). One of the possible integration scenarios can be connecting it to the Microsoft Dynamics NAV economic system.

Benefits

After the implementation of the solution, Arca Capital uses an efficient and flexible tool to support management of investment and financial projects. The main benefits are:

• Overview and better information on project status.
• Minimized paperwork.
• Reduction of administrative load for routine administration tasks.
• High data access security.
• Availability of information through a unified and user-friendly interface.
• Easy operation of the application.
• Effective search with Knowledge Management elements.
• Easy-to-define overviews and statistics.
• Robust Framework able to cover demanding requirements for introduction of new documents and flows thereof.

Products and Technologies

• • 4-layer application
• Microsoft Windows Server 2000
• Microsoft Indexing Services
• COM+ objekty
• Microsoft Internet Information Server 5.0
• Web services
• XML dokumenty
• .NET Framework 1.1

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