Hi,
Engaging in shameless self-promotion... However, it appears that you've liked the announcement of other sites on this forum, so I'm posting this piece here. I hope you find it interesting to see what OpenACS is good for...
The Customer:
Our customer is the IT department of "Basler Kantonalbank - Bank Coop Group" (BKB), a top-5 Swiss bank. BKB's principal activity is the provision of a variety of financial services, including mortgage lending, private loans, securities trading, foreign exchange trading and consultancy.
About 200 active users from IT department, marketing and property management serving about 2000 bank users ("in-house customers") use ]project-open[ for project management, project portfolio management, project collaboration and project controlling.
The Customer's Needs:
The principal use of the system is to collect consolidated timesheet information from the active users in order to invoice the internal bank customers for the delivered services. Other uses include project management, project portfolio management, project collaboration and financial and efficiency controlling.
Business Processes:
In order to satisfy the customer's needs a number of processes had to be implemented in order to gather information in a consistent way. Implemented business processes include:
- Project Management:
Planning, execution and tracking of projects and milestones.
- Service Request Self-Service:
In-house customers can request and track small projects (Service Requests) using a self-service interface.
- Service Request Authorization:
A group of "Account Managers" confirm incoming service requests via workflow and assign the tasks to business managers for authorization
- Service Request Assignation & Execution:
Service requests are then assigned to IT staff according to a series of corporate policies.
- Timesheet Management:
Capturing work times on projects and Service Requests
- Project Collaboration:
Project teams use collaboration tools to effectively manage work
- Reporting:
Detailed operational reporting for various user groups
Solution Overview:
The finished solution consists of the following IT components:
- ]project-open[ 3.2.7 project management & controlling
- based on the OpenACS 5.1.5 community system
- running the PostgreSQL 7.4 database
- and the AOLServer 3.3oacs application server
- on a dual core SuSE SLES 8 Linux server.
]po[ already covered most of the business requirements out of the box with the available configuration options. The service request self-service and workflow processes are implemented using the OpenACS "Petri-Net" Workflow with custom extensions to implement the corporate authorization and execution procedures.
Only the service request module contains custom code. The rest of the system consists of vanilla ]po[ code, greatly reducing maintenance costs and allowing for a direct upgrade path to future ]po[ versions.
Technical Solution Details:
The following packages and package groups were used to implement the solution:
- OpenACS Core 5.1.5:
]po[ only uses part of the core OpenACS functionality. In particular, ]po[ comes with its own maintenance screens for user management, permissions. ]po[ uses a single "subsite".
- ]project-open[ Core 3.2.7:
Provides the main ]po[ business objects such as projects, companies and user subtypes such as employees and customers. The "Core" also contains the ]po[ permissions subsystem and a user-configurable GUI.
- ]project-open[ Dynamic Fields 3.2.7:
DynFields allow for the extension of ]po[ objects with new fields at runtime. DynFields is based on the OpenACS metadata model (acs_attributes) and the "Attribute Management System" (AMS) from Matthew Geddard and Richard Hamilton.
- ]project-open[ Financials 3.2.7:
Provides the ]po[ financial system, defining objects such as CostItems, CostCenters, Payments, FinancialDocuments, Timesheet, ServiceType, PriceList and ExchangeRates in several packages.
- ]project-open[ "Community" 3.2.7:
Refers to several packages such as Forum, Filestorage, Wiki, Simple Surveys, Bug-Tracker and Full Text Search together with ]po[ wrappers and special permission routines.
- Petri-Net "Workflow 4.5":
This workflow module forms the base for the RFC self-service module. It provides a graphical workflow designer and the WF runtime environment including debugging and exception handling.
- ]project-open[ Reporting 3.2.7:
Refers to several packages implementing a reporting engine and ~10 reports
- ]project-open[ Data-Warehouse Cubes 3.2.7:
Implements several data-warehouse "Cube" pivot tables for multidimensional reporting and analysis. The DW takes automatically advantage of DynFields as analysis dimensions.
References:
- Christoph Marbach, Project Manager BKB
- Frank Bergmann, Founder ]project-open[
About ]project-open[:
]project-open[ (http://www.project-open.com/) is a project management and PSA (Professional Services Automatization) system for companies in the consulting, engineering, advertising and localization industries. It covers the entire project life cycle from sales (CRM-light), staffing, execution (timesheet, controlling, incidents, discussions, and file storage) to invoicing and payment. The P/O architecture is designed for mission-critical applications with a rock-solid infrastructure and a sophisticated role-based permission system.
