Remote Solution Assessment to Support Our Client’s Decision-making Process

Business challenge

Our client owns a chain of premium resorts with integrated casino gaming facilities in Asia, Australia, and Europe. Having provided an excellent entertainment experience to guests for years, the company has grown to more than 21,000 employees. Consequently, they needed to modernize their employee management system. But they faced some decisions: Should they update the existing system or implement a new one? If they updated the existing system, what features must be updated? If they went with a new system, should they purchase an existing solution or build a custom one?

Our client had to consider a lot of information to make a wise choice. Therefore, they began looking for a mature vendor who would not just execute tasks by following instructions but collaborate with them to find the right approach to product development and management.

Our client chose Intellias to support their decision-making process for our experience in consulting services along with deep technological expertise.

Solution delivered

Intellias aimed to provide an optimal employee management solution that would be both performative for numerous users and cost-effective for the company. Therefore, we suggested conducting a system assessment to acquire sufficient information for defining the best solution. Once our client approved the solution, we developed a further action plan, which included an on-site visit.

However, in spring 2020, global circumstances prevented us from traveling. With people’s health as our highest priority, we agreed to collaborate remotely. This presented us with the challenge of planning online communication and ensuring cybersecurity.

Planning a remote solution assessment

A successful assessment at Intellias comprises three key aspects.

First, our proprietary remote assessment methodology includes best practices and is geared to reveal a client’s business goals. It also involves a step-by-step tailored plan that allows the client to easily grasp all actions taken by the Intellias team, the outcomes of those actions, and their impact on the project.

Second, understanding the significance of data integrity and security for each client’s business, we ensure top cyber security measures for safe access to information and environments that need to be assessed as well as for safe remote communication and data transfer. Cyber security measures we implemented for this project include:

• Laptop encryption
• Access and account management (GPO, password policy, access policy)
• Host intrusion prevention
• Malware and exploit protection
• Encryption of data during the transition
• Channel encryption (VPN for remote work, IPSEC VPN for site-to-site)
• LAN access control
• Firewall
• Network intrusion prevention

The final aspect of our successful remote solution assessment was establishing online communication. We agreed on presenting daily status reports in addition to ad hoc communication. Besides allowing us to fine-tune the next steps and resolve blockers, this communication approach helped us avoid misunderstandings and make our work as transparent as possible.

Conducting a remote solution assessment

We defined three workstreams: business, technical, and design analysis. The business analysis stream covered analysis of current business processes, analysis of the current system alignment with business goals, and defining the needed functionality followed by mapping it to new solution requirements. The technical stream involved assessing the solution architecture, analyzing system quality attributes, and aligning the solution with business goals. Within the design stream, we conducted UI/UX analysis and interviewed several of our client’s employees to get insights about:

• what functionality they use and if it’s provided in a user-friendly way
• what problems they have using the existing app
• how the app impacts their productivity
• what features they still need.

We presented all the gaps we discovered in a solution assessment report along with recommended improvements.

Supporting the decision-making process

After assessing the existing employee management solution, we investigated the benefits and drawbacks of custom built versus out-of-the-box employee management software.

We conducted market research to select off-the-shelf solutions with the most suitable features for human resources management flows and the needs of our client. Next, together with our client’s key decision-makers, we defined evaluation criteria:

• Coverage of business requirements
• Integration with the current technology ecosystem
• Effort needed for customization and configuration
• Upfront price and maintenance costs
• Risks of implementation timeframe or cost overruns

Then the Intellias team used the criteria to evaluate preselected out-of-the-box solutions versus custom platform development versus upgrading the existing system. Based on the results of this evaluation, we prepared a comparative analysis report and presented it to the client.

Taking a step forward

When providing consulting services, we always treat our clients’ business goals as the priority and strive to deliver the most value. During the project assessment, we gained a deep understanding of our client’s specific employee management flows. Combined with our experience in software engineering, this allowed us to envision the solution our client needed. Therefore, we designed a high-level architecture for one of the system features using the domain-driven design. We also designed the user interface and user experience and developed a clickable prototype to demonstrate the look and feel of the solution.

This initiative was highly appreciated by our client, as they valued a mature approach to work.

Business value

As a result of our evaluation, our client received solid verifiable information to support their decision-making process. Based on the data provided, key stakeholders were able to examine and model the possible consequences of different choices: upgrading the existing system, purchasing licensed software, or developing a custom solution for employee management. They were also able to benchmark whatever option they chose against a prototype developed by Intellias.

Human resources management is a major factor in business success, especially in the hospitality industry. Therefore, companies must have a mature tool for ensuring the smooth operation of their workers. Since our client approached the matter thoroughly and reached out to Intellias for consulting services and support with decision-making, they now have a reliable base for building a strong employee management system.