CRM SYSTEM

For a fortune 5 company, SDG was involved in architecture redesign and implementation of a legacy system that is used to manage their contracts processes, including the requirements management and ensuring compliance with all standards set forth by the customer and any export control laws and/or procurement regulations set forth by the US government.

The system is the only control method in place to ensure compliance with a wide variety of regulations imposed by different external sources, and impacting a large section of the business, from contracts to production. The storage and automated management of the related documents and document fragments is key to the compliance processes. In addition, the internal functioning of the organization and distributed ownership of documents creates a complex set of functionality available to each person in the contracts management and compliance process. The system is also used to track and maintain contractual data for legal and auditing purposes, including changes and revisions, and its content serves as a basis for negotiations with customers.

Due to the complex nature of the processes involved and the internal regulations that govern those processes, as well as the limitations of the technology at the time of development, the following high-level objectives were implemented:

• Modify/expand functionality in some areas, including improved automation of numerous processes.
• Generalize input limitations to accept time-phased document components and assign to a single item while maintaining the functionality of all the other processes.
• Implement role-based security within the existing framework to the granularity of a single document fragment.
• Provide a long-term archival solution while preserving the complete knowledge base for search/retrieval.
• Resolve numerous performance-based issues.

The solution was to be implemented in the existing framework, which comprised of Oracle as the backend data store for process states and other functions, FileNet Panagon as the document storage/retrieval engine, Sybase PowerBuilder as the user interface application and Microsoft Word as the word processing tool of choice. A web interface to the system was implemented that provides limited functionality in terms of viewing/retrieving documents online for authorized personnel. This was implemented using a CGI interface written in ProC.