In
a project called BizTalk for ADAM, Mitrais has automated its business processes
to generate billing information based on data collected from its Microsoft
Office Project Server.
Mitrais administration staff report savings of 40 percent in the time
required to issue invoices and are planning to automate other processes using
BizTalk.
BizTalk is a business process management (BPM) server. It uses ‘adapters’
which are tailored to communicate with different software systems used in large
enterprises to enable companies to automate and integrate business processes.
Ken McClellan, Mitrais CTO explains that the BizTalk service is used mainly
by the company’s administrative scheduling and accounting department which
manages contract and employee timesheet information in two applications called
ADAM and SONIC.
BizTalk is triggered automatically when a project manager publishes updates
to a project in Microsoft Project Server, gathering contract information from
ADAM (Availability, Development Accounting and Matrix system) and automatically
generating work orders and timesheets into SONIC (Scheduler On the Net and
Invoicing Compass) for further invoice processing.
BizTalk also notifies project owners or managers by email when the projects
they are responsible for have been published in Microsoft Office Project Server
and administration staffs are notified of any exceptions that need attention. An
additional workflow step has been added to the out of the box Project Server
publishing process that initiates the automated workflow.