CityU :: Consultancy Workflow Management

Introduction

Applied research and consultancy are key aspects of the mission of City University of Hong Kong. CityU Professional Services Limited (CPS), a company of City University of Hong Kong, was set up as a non-profit-making company to facilitate and promote commercial consultancy and contract research work. In 2004, CPS performed roughly 800 commercial projects. With the growing success of the University as a leading applied R & D center in Hong Kong, CPS decided to create a Web-based Outside Practice Information System to better manage all their commercial projects.

OPIS is a workflow system that streamlines the submission of outside practice application forms, approval of commercial projects, management of budgets, and project statuses. This system greatly simplifies and streamlines the management of hundreds of commercial projects.

Our Client

CityU Professional Services Limited (CPS), a company of City University of Hong Kong, is a professional consultancy firm offering high quality contract research and consultancy services from the University to public and private organizations in many different industries. Over the years, it has quickly become one of the leading applied R & D service providers in Hong Kong, with annual project turnover of roughly US$6 to US$7 million. CPS has access to a potent consultancy team with a broad spectrum of expertise, as well as to the state-of-art technologies and facilities of the University. These valuable resources have put CPS in an unrivalled position to meet the different needs of various industries in Hong Kong.

Business Needs

In facilitating and promoting consultancy work and contract research to the public, CPS needs a highly capable information management system to keep track of, approve and monitor hundreds of on-going outside practice projects.

Currently, the outside practice workflow includes processing the application submitted by all parties involved in each projects, seeking project approval from relevant managers and providing general administrative and accounting support for projects. With increasing demand and scale of outside practice projects, the workload using traditional paper forms was just too difficult to manage.

By using the latest Web technologies, the workflow to manage outside practices can be a lot simpler, convenient and streamlined. CPS commissioned us to tailor-make the OPIS Web application to support this mission critical need.

Technology

The main objective of OPIS was to make the workflow of the management of contract consultancy/research projects as efficient, effective and secure as possible. We used the latest Web technologies, such as Microsoft .NET in designing OPIS and the latest secure features. The OPIS application efficiently manages all outside practice applications and has standard interfaces for external systems.

OPIS basically covers the entire workflow of CPS concerning outside practice projects. Main features include providing CPS with reports and statistics to support its work, streamlining CPS workflow with Web forms, providing analysis reports to management, automating the approval process and integrating with external systems.

Business Benefits

With OPIS, the workflow of processing contract consultancy/research projects for CPS is made more manageable and scalable to support the growth of CPS. In addition, valuable management information and statistics are now easier created to enable CPS to further improve the financial management of its projects.

Last modified: Thursday, 28-Apr-2005 16:38:05 HKT

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