Abel Solutions’ FastPortal™ Puts Skylight Financial, Inc. on a Fast Track to SharePoint Deployment

An Abel Solutions Development Case Study

By the time Skylight Financial, Inc. began an in-house implementation of SharePoint, inefficient work flows and scattered communication processes had already become a source of major frustration. When the in-house effort stalled, Skylight Financial management knew the company needed help, and quickly. The answer came in the form of Abel Solutions’ FastPortal™. With FastPortal, Abel Solutions deployed SharePoint in fewer than four weeks, minimizing disruption and giving Skylight Financial system-wide improvements almost immediately.

Challenge

Like many firms, Skylight Financial had an extensive, computerized information pool that had evolved over time. Numerous important emails, documents and other data were stored in disparate locations. The company had a centrally-stored knowledge base -- intended for use by call center employees in helping customers – that was not structured or organized well enough to be fully and easily accessible. Call center response and resolution time was being negatively impacted by the disorganization, and productivity in all areas was affected by the poor assimilation of information.

The company had previously created an intranet site intended to facilitate communication and information flow, but maintaining it and keeping it up to date had presented a challenge. After evaluating its options, Skylight Financial determined that SharePoint would offer the benefits it needed. The plan was to aggregate documentation and other relevant information in a single location accessible through SharePoint. The firm also wanted a comprehensive, searchable and largely automated knowledge base system that enabled call center employees to type in a customer’s question and have the pertinent solution pop up.

With its strong track record in SharePoint-based solutions and innovative delivery methodology, Abel Solutions was a natural fit for Skylight’s urgent situation.

Solution

The Abel Solutions team immediately recognized that Skylight Financial was a perfect candidate for the Fast Portal system. This approach combines an innovative delivery methodology with templates, worksheets and intensive training sessions to get a SharePoint Portal up in fewer than four weeks. However, Skylight Financial’s requirements were considerable, given the compressed FastPortal deployment timeline.

Rather than attempt to rectify problems with the existing SharePoint solution, Abel Solutions initiated a new implementation using best practices, proper backup and restore procedures, automated metrics gathering for reporting purposes and other processes that would enhance the stability and effectiveness of the SharePoint solution.

Accelerating portal development by building on existing FastPortal templates, Abel helped the company craft a cohesive internal employee interaction and data exchange system. Since a major point of concern was the call center and its information-access challenges, the Abel Solutions project team placed intensive focus on that system. They quickly consolidated disparate collections of information and a seemingly endless flow of emails and attachments into a single, comprehensive data repository. This formed the foundation of a streamlined, intuitive “ask and answer” knowledge base.

Results

With the tightly integrated and automated SharePoint portal ready for deployment into production, employees were enthusiastic about the improved efficiencies they would gain. Intensive training of staff and department heads gave participants competent control of the new system within days.

“ [An issue for us was] the amount of time our developers were spending, and that has gone to zero,” says Cal Holman, Skylight Financial’s CIO. “We’re already documenting a significant improvement of response rates in our call center,” he continues. “SharePoint allows the employees to graph, chart and manipulate data. In the call center they have a goal for their average speed of answer and call. Traditionally, those stats were only reported weekly or monthly. Now on the call center page there is a green, red or yellow indicator of whether they are hitting that metric on a daily basis. Things like that are getting a lot of excitement to the new intranet.”

“As we got into it, we discovered work flows that would eliminate the need for detail-intensive processes, [because] we have been able to focus those into SharePoint,” says Holman. “Another advantage over the old site is the ability to manage the document content... to get away from the rat’s nest of shared directories and [make information] accessible to everyone.”

Enthusiasm for the new system is running so high that the company is proactively looking for new ways to take advantage of the SharePoint deployment. As part of the FastPortal planning sessions, Abel Solutions introduced department heads to the concept of work flows – something they were quick to embrace. According to Holman, department heads have submitted so many great ideas for new work flows – for everything from timesheets to expenses – that Skylight Financial sees itself implementing further improvements far into the future.

“The team from Abel Solutions had a strong working knowledge of the product and could easily articulate relevant business applications,” says Holman. “Once we got them on site, they were able to get the product installed quickly and simultaneously transfer a great deal of knowledge to our staff.”