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Case Study: Accelerate the Configuration Process to Save Valuable Time for Your Client & Development Team
ABOUT THE CLIENT:
Challenge:
Our client is a large-scale company that provides its clients with an extensive range of expense management services. Our client’s expense management platform makes managing expenses, invoices, approvals, and purchases easier for their customers since they use automation, business intelligence, and a number of other functionalities to make their platform efficient and easy to use.
Solution:
Our client assembled a Live Configuration team to keep up with day-to-day requests from users. Not long after, the client realized that to better serve the needs of their many customers, they would need to expand their team with a new role. They wanted to hire an expert with deep knowledge of the logic and functionality of their platform so they would understand and be able to solve any issue clients might raise.
Result:
Here are the benefits of having a Solution Administrator compared to only having a configuration team:
- Reduced risk of outages and security breaches through visibility and tracking of the changes to your systems.
- Cost reduction by having detailed knowledge of all the elements of your configuration, avoiding wasteful duplication of your technology assets.
- Improved experience for your customers and internal staff by rapidly detecting and correcting improper configurations that could negatively impact performance.
The Need
Our client is a large-scale company that provides its clients with an extensive range of expense management services. Our client’s expense management platform makes managing expenses, invoices, approvals, and purchases easier for their customers since they use automation, business intelligence, and a number of other functionalities to make their platform efficient and easy to use.
At the beginning of developing a large platform, most companies strive to deliver great value internally, as it ensures initial user satisfaction. Once a platform has buy-in from users, the company can begin developing and adding more advanced client-facing features.
The Challenge
While our client already offered a great platform for expense management, many of their users wanted to customize the platform to fit their own special requirements. These companies who used the platform wanted to personalize the platform so it would better serve their business. However, tailoring the platform to fit the needs of a huge number of users is no easy fit.
Our client assembled a Live Configuration team to keep up with day-to-day requests from users. Not long after, the client realized that to better serve the needs of their many customers, they would need to expand their team with a new role.
They wanted to hire an expert with deep knowledge of the logic and functionality of their platform so they would understand and be able to solve any issue clients might raise.
They sought a Solution Administrator who would have dedicated customers and would have extensive knowledge of the platform. Since we have worked together since 2011, the client entrusted Softjourn with finding the perfect Solution Administrator for the job
The Solution
The Solution Administrator is one of the most recent additions to our client’s team. They work directly with clients and are responsible for configuring software so it answers clients changing needs. Their focus is on helping our client’s users wishing to obtain more advanced services on their platform using most optimal configurations.
In some cases, those users of expense management services already know exactly what they want and if they understand the system, so SA provides them with the most effective way to develop a certain feature or change the customer journey they are currently using. The Solutions Administrator can consult clients and suggest solutions that can be immediately implemented in their system so the client would have a system that’s customized and accurately represents the company’s rules so it could contribute to reducing annual reimbursement expenses.
In the short term, SA can resolve quick to-do items, creates new paths to the system, and offer a better understanding of the current configuration. And on the long run, it supports the stability of the system and its performance.
On the other hand, some users have a rudimentary understanding of the expanse management platform, and SA needs to assess their business needs and provides them with several different options that would solve the issue they have. A big part of their work is also to describe and delegate tasks to the development team so that they can upgrade some functionalities or even build customized ones.
Another big responsibility of SAs is creating tasks for other teams to work on. The most common problems are filtering logic or allocations, expense and invoice routing flows, and file export prices to our client’s ERP systems. When we talked with SA from Softjourn, he shared that, in some cases, he also needs to step in and develop unique solutions for clients. One of the more recent examples was building the allocation filter for a client.
“One of the latest projects I worked on was a full application rebuild, and one of the tasks related to allocation filter was quite complex, so I decided to build it myself. Since the requirements were constantly changing, it was difficult to communicate with the team so I presented my idea to the client. I built an allocation filter that probably surpassed all the other ones we developed as it was very complex, and the client was very excited about my soution. Thanks to it, in the first 3 months after deployment, the amount of money that was reimbursed through our client's platform was more than $10 million. And the client was very excited about it“, explained our SA.
Usually, all consultants are required to manage small and medium projects and communicate with live customers that are in need of feedback, consulting, or adding improvements to their existing system. Also, they could assist in developing and updating different management flows and processes to ensure the client’s processes are more efficient and automated whenever possible.
By managing multiple projects and tackling requests from live customers, the Solution Administrator was responsible for ensuring that our client’s customers can take advantage of existing resources on their platform, request new features, and customize current offerings according to their business requirements.
Here are the benefits of having a Solution Administrator compared to only having a configuration team:
- Reduced risk of outages and security breaches through visibility and tracking of the changes to your systems.
- Cost reduction by having detailed knowledge of all the elements of your configuration, avoiding wasteful duplication of your technology assets.
- Improved experience for your customers and internal staff by rapidly detecting and correcting improper configurations that could negatively impact performance.
- Strict control of your processes by defining and enforcing formal policies and procedures that govern asset identification, status monitoring, and auditing.
- Greater agility and faster problem resolution, enabling you to provide a higher quality of service and reduce software engineering costs.
- Efficient change management by knowing your baseline configuration and having the visibility to design changes that avoid problems.
- Quicker restoration of service. In an outage, you'll be able to recover quickly as your configuration is documented and automated.
- Better release management
In this particular case, the Solution Administrator contributed and continues to consistently improve the success of our client’s platform by:
- Analyzing and addressing a variety of different issues clients bring to their attention
- Creating requests and tasks for the development team
- Working on compliance rules
- Solving issues with expense and invoice routing
- Managing export changes
- Providing accurate and prompt troubleshooting assistance
We were happy to help our client offer a well-polished and extremely efficient expense management platform that can be personalized to each of their customers. With a dedicated Solution Administrator, our client’s users no longer have to wait for big reveals or application updates but can make changes in real-time and receive the expedient customer support they appreciate.
Conclusion
If you want to provide an extra level of service to your customers, adding a Solution Administrator, who can translate user requests into brilliant software and automated features, will serve as a great addition to your team.
Relying on a high-quality Solution Administrator to tailor your product to fit your clients’ needs is a smart investment to ensure a high level of user satisfaction and customer retention on your platform.
Softjourn always takes into account how we can help our clients save resources, solve their toughest tech problems, and discover great, new opportunities. Interested in a free consultation to see how we can help you achieve your business and software goals? Contact us today!