Integration...

Saying we are Integration Experts means being able to connect disparate organizational operations, systems and platforms...

One option is to rewrite all the applications to talk to each other - obviously impractical. Why should a large investment in IT infrastructure be thrown away, especially when the legacy application continues to provide value in other parts of the organization? A better way is to integrate and implement the existing systems so they can communicate with one another and share data. For example, an extranet designed to show customers the status of their projects might need to pull information from a project management system, accounting package, document management system, warehousing and a sales management system in order to be effective and provide value to the customer.

Information exists in many places: accounting, human resources, budgeting, inventory, project management, marketing, clinical research and others. In many organizations, this information is stored in systems that do not talk to each other. What can be done to bring this information together?

Professional Optimizations...

...We take a step back before any application implementation and ensure that the process does what it is supposed to do. Interest and engage your customer and deliver on your promises...

In terms of application development, process optimization is analogous to requirements gathering, meaning it is as vital to the success of the application development effort as is the actual coding. It forces businesses to take an honest look at their existing processes, which leads to a thorough understanding of the inputs, outputs, and each step associated with a process before trying to make any optimizations.

Process optimization is the practice of making a set of tasks repeatable and efficient. There are several solutions to a problem, but the best one is the one that costs the least, is the quickest, requires the least people to accomplish, or some hybrid of each of these. Our team has extensive experience guiding process optimization efforts in search of that "best" solution. We excel at analyzing existing practices to find the potential bottlenecks, meticulously unravelling suspects until core issues are identified. We document these results and look for ways to improve the outputs while at the same time decreasing the inputs or steps.

Why outsource? Process optimization is a difficult to implement internally. Most individuals are so focused on completing their daily job that they do not recognize the problems that persist. We are able to identify patterns across organizations and entertain all possibilities when improving the process as a whole. This is our job; we are trained to recognize patterns and are constantly searching for ways to improve processes, and because we have led process optimization efforts at dozens of organizations, we have an extensive and expanding knowledge base of lessons learned.

Professional return on investment...

DFC International designs its application from the perspective of the end-user. This approach places the focus on the usefulness and usability of the system, rather than on some desired technical solution. By designing systems from the outside in, we are able to develop and structure the user interface early in the process while the systems architecture is being developed, which leads to clear and uncomplicated systems that are easy to use.

Software applications provide value only if the return on investment is measurable in terms of process efficiency, reduction of labour and increase in communications. In other words, we center our efforts around the needs of the end-user who happens to be your customer. Isn't that what this is all about in the first place?

The value of an application is its benefits less its cost. An application can:

1) reduce the costs of an existing business process;
2) increase the amount of work performed for the same cost;
3) gather data for analysis; and...
4) share information across boundaries.

The better an application is, the more of each type of benefit it will provide. Additionally, in order to achieve any benefit, an application must be used, which means it must make the end-user's job easier.