The Mexican province of Hidalgo with its more than 2 million inhabitants is provided with drinking water by CAASIM (Comision de agua y alcantarillado de sistmas intermunicipales). Despite CAASIMs success as an innovative and efficient water supply company for many years, its profitability is narrowed by the fact that a large portion of the consumed water frequently is not paid for. After considering this further, one finds that the reason for the problem is business processes that do not optimally support CAASIMs business in some areas. During a detailed analysis, PROMATIS identified functional gaps in the business processes of managing new orders and billing, allowing various forms of manipulation.
Because of this reason, the CAASIM management has initiated an ambitious business process reengineering project, aiming towards the development of much more secure business processes in order to guarantee a significant and lasting increase of profit. For this purpose, an efficient reengineering team has been built that combined CAASIM process specialists with experienced PROMATIS business consultants. On the basis of a first rough business process analysis, the team prepared optimization proposals, which were documented in the form of clearly arranged graphical models, and which later were evaluated via process simulation. For these tasks, the Web-based tools of the INCOME suite have been used.
After the acceptance of the new, optimized business processes, the team developed an IT concept, allowing for the rapid and secure implementation of the business processes in the daily work, and furthermore offering flexibility towards future process modifications. The decision was made to introduce a powerful Oracle 9i server platform, designed towards the processing of large amounts of data in conjunction with Web-based self-service elements. For the realization of the performance-critical workflows and the document management functionality, CAASIM decided to implement the think Collaboration Services! by PROMATIS.
The project responsibility for the implementation had been delegated to DigiPro, a Mexican software specialist and PROMATIS alliance partner who also accepted responsibility for the imaging tasks and for the subsequent hosting of the system. The development of the new business process software was carried out by a team of PROMATIS specialists, providing state of the art know-how in the areas of workflow and document management, Oracle 9i and Java. Furthermore, CAASIM employees have been integrated into the development team in order to allow for an early transfer of know-how. The project languages were English and Spanish.
The think Collaboration Services! form the centrepiece of the new system: The think Workflow Manager! takes care of efficient and clearly to understand processes and decisions and makes sure that all orders are managed and carried out according to the given business rules - not only now but also after process modifications that are to be expected in the future. All accrued documents are managed with the think Content Manager! in conjunction with Oracle Files in an Oracle 9i database. Already in the development phase it became obvious that, due to the use of the think Collaboration Services!, the development effort had been reduced significantly and the quality and flexibility of the system had been effectively increased.
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