In response to the COVID-19 crisis, Stevens reached out to mayor of the city of Hoboken, NJ to offer consulting services to local businesses. During the Fall of 2020, a Stevens team worked with this company and was tasked to understand their business model and its existing customer base as well reviewed its service desk ticketing process and the four systems providing feeds into its unified logging system. The team’s goal proposed some initial changes to the service/desk ticket process and attribution and to build key metrics and common benchmarks for service/management across all clients and business services. Spring 2022 semester will be our 4th semester working with this client. This company offers a web-based platform and a trained service team which handles all of the IT needs of small, medium, large businesses including 7×24 IT Support, Cloud Services, and Security and Privacy Services. Highly regarded for their customer service and the quality of their work, this rapidly expanding company is looking to reduce, streamline, and optimize their business processes. They are implementing a workflow orchestration platform and introducing robotic process automation (RPA) methods to take previously high volume, very manual processes, and fully automate them. This company is looking for a Stevens team to identify, review, and redesign those processes offering the greatest potential for improvement. They hope to begin using their new platform to put a few of them into production by the end of the year and hopes the Spring 2022 team will be able to continue in these areas. This is a high priority project for the company. Successful implementation of these capabilities will allow the company to significantly increase the number of clients and devices under management and the profitability of the company and to continue to improve their customer service. MSIS, MBA and BIA Students with experience in process innovation, database design, data analytics, data integration, and the use of APIs should consider this project.
History of the work accomplished to date: For the Spring 2021 semester, a Stevens team continued where the Fall 2020 team left off. Working with the company, the team gained direct access to these systems to the data feeds coming from them. For the Fall 2021, we split the work between two teams. Team One continued their work in defining the highest priority processes under the direct supervision of a company employees and within the regulatory, cybersecurity controls appropriate for the many services that they offers to their customers. Team Two focused their work on utilizing a robotic automation tool to provide enhanced automated capabilities to a subset of these processes. The two teams worked very closely with Team 2 and progressed with 3 or 6 selected high volume and high impact processes. Going forward in Spring 2022 For Spring 2022, because of the high coordination required for the project, the teams will be consolidated back into a single team going forward.
Improvement of identified and prioritized work processes: · Work with the team and the technical resources available for companies affiliated with the four source systems. The team will review and document the existing data available from the feeds and assess whether additional data/information can be extracted from these source systems. · Provide in-depth database programming skills and experience in ETL (extract, transform, load) functions to ensure the data is in the correct format to be correlated across all feeder systems. · Propose and confirm key success indicators which should be measured to track the efficiency and effectiveness of company service delivery. The team will also work on ensuring the data will allow the company to benchmark their services across key groups such as municipalities, law firms and architectural/building firms. A consistent set of reporting metrics will assist the company as it grows its business and to better market both the quantitative and qualitative benefits of using company technologies in comparison to its competitors. · Work with the team and the technical resources available for companies affiliated with the four source systems. The team will review and document the existing data available from the feeds and assess whether additional data/information can be extracted from these source systems. · Provide in-depth database programming skills and experience in ETL (extract, transform, load) functions to ensure the data is in the correct format to be correlated across all feeder systems. · Propose and confirm key success indicators which should be measured to track the efficiency and effectiveness of company service delivery. The team will also work on ensuring the data will allow the company to benchmark their services across key groups such as municipalities, law firms and architectural/building firms. A consistent set of reporting metrics will assist the company as it grows its business and to better market both the quantitative and qualitative benefits of using company technologies in comparison to its competitors. Use of the Robotic Process Automation toolset to a subset of these processes · This company is again looking for a Stevens team to identify, review, and redesign those processes offering the greatest potential for improvement via automated tool · The company began using the new platform and to put a few of them into production by the end of the year. This is a high priority project for the company and they hope the Stevens team can continue working on high value processes. · Successful implementation of these capabilities will allow the company to significantly increase the number of clients and devices under management and the profitability of the company and to continue to improve their customer service. MSIS, MBA and BIA Students with experience in process innovation, database design, data analytics, data integration, and the use of APIs should consider this project. Team Qualifications: A team will be composed of individuals, who collectively can provide experience in the following technical areas and advisory backgrounds. This experience may have been gained through prior educational and work experiences or through courses, internship work or research students have acquired while at Stevens: · Database design and development · Consulting, business process design/ process innovation · Direct work with 3rd party software providers · Extract, transform, load (ETL) coding. · Web development · Real-time data streaming and alerting systems. · Knowledge of Cloud architecture and the use of APIs · Systems administration experience and/or certifications (Students with a strong background in systems administration and specifically Microsoft Powershell scripting will be strongly considered for this project.) · Familiarity with quantitative and statistical concepts · Strong technical skills in Microsoft Office; data visualization tools · Strong interpersonal skills and the ability to interact well with all levels of management · Ability to be a team player able to build productive relationships · Business writing and presentation skills · Knowledge of project management