Business Systems Integration

Summary

ESI Employee Assistance Group, one of the 20 largest employee assistance service providers in the United States, services over 1,500 businesses and approximately 750,000 employees nationwide. They offer counseling services, literature, and testing to help build better work environments across America. The variety of services provided by ESI grew exponentially during the last couple of years. Compiling services usage statistics across multiple systems and then physically mailing reports to 1,500 clients was a major source of productivity drain. Lance Technologies helped integrate the disparate systems and automated the reporting functionality.

Problem

As Employee Services continued to grow, they continued to add more web-based services to their suite of offerings.  They also integrated an electronic workflow system.  Each of these separate components was provided by different third party vendors.  At the end of each month, Employee Services sends a usage report to each of its clients.  With over 1500 clients, usage coming from 750,000 employees, and usage data coming in from three separate data sources, ESI needed a solution to tabulate all the information into a cohesive report.  Unfortunately, the obvious solution was impossible - the vendor for their workflow system no longer supported it.  ESI contracted with Lance Technologies to work out an integration solution that could bridge these three services together.

Solution

Lance Technologies developed a central location for all the usage information to converge.  This integration module is built to accept data uploads from ESI's workflow system and from one of their additional services.  After uploading all the data into the system, the integration module provides a download of the combined usage report using data from all three sources.  From there, some of this data is shuttled back into the workflow system.  The workflow system creates a PDF report containing all the information from all the report data.  This PDF report is then sent back to the website where it is available for download for ESI's clients.

This custom integration saves ESI over a hundred worker-hours per month.  Before Lance Technologies integrated the various solutions together, ESI had to manually combine the data from all 3 data sources, and then print out reports for their 1,500 clients and mail them.  A several day process now has been reduced to less than one hour.