Go BackShepherd Chartered Surveyors selects OpenSpan to streamline business processes across desktops
OpenSpan, Inc the enabler of the New Enterprise Desktop, today announced that Shepherd Chartered Surveyors has selected the OpenSpan Platform to improve and automate business process workflows for its contact center agents. By using the OpenSpan Platform to quickly integrate its many disparate legacy and proprietary systems, Shepherd created a new unified interface for its contact center agents that have already reduced operating costs by 12 percent in less than two months.
A leading provider of residential and commercial mortgage appraisals for banks and lending institutions across the United Kingdom, Shepherd has a staff of more than 95 contact center agents who use multiple applications to process survey reports and communicate data to lenders' back office systems. Before OpenSpan, the agents had to manually enter data into each separate internal application and then replicate it to one of three industry wide platforms used by lenders-a very inefficient, time-consuming and error-prone process.
"We needed an integration tool that would provide an open API into the various applications running on our agent desktops," said Martyn Wells, group IT director, Shepherd Chartered Surveyors. "Directly through the OpenSpan Platform's graphical interface we can integrate applications and build new desktop user interfaces without using any new programming language or requiring access to source code. With OpenSpan, we were able to more quickly reach our goal of a true service-oriented architecture that is expected to save us upwards of 20 percent on operating costs in less than 12 months."
With its .NET-based tools, the OpenSpan Platform enabled Shepherd to integrate its corporate desktop legacy applications regardless of their ownership or original origin. The entire OpenSpan deployment took less then seven weeks and Shepherd is already seeing the productivity benefits on its contact center agent desktops. Shepherd's contact center agents now enter data only once into the new integrated front-end dashboard. The data is then automatically populated in all previously selected applications, eliminating manual tasks, errors and time delays.
The OpenSpan Platform can integrate applications that are not visible by opening up the application's presentation layer, providing the IT manager with same access to the application's core objects as the original developer. With the ability to integrate Windows, Java, DOS and Web-based applications without requiring any changes to the underlying code, OpenSpan enables organizations in all industries to more quickly realize the benefits of service-oriented architectures (SOA) on every enterprise desktop. In addition, OpenSpan provides near-immediate ROI with its ability to cleanly execute self-contained, incremental integration projects.
"With some of the most demanding desktops in any business environment, contact centers like Shepherd's are the ideal proving ground for our unique approach to application integration," said Francis Carden, CEO of OpenSpan. "With a short implementation time and rapid ROI, the OpenSpan Platform has already been implemented in a number of contact centers across North America and Europe. By improving business process management practices on every contact center desktop, OpenSpan is helping agents spend more time servicing and up-selling customers and less time toggling between applications."
About OpenSpan, Inc.
Global 2000 enterprises leverage the OpenSpan Platform to integrate applications, automate business processes, extend functionality and build new composite applications in order to realize immediate value on their IT investments. OpenSpan and its partners utilize the company's unique approach to integration to accelerate service-oriented architecture (SOA) deployments and increase enterprise desktop productivity. The award-winning OpenSpan Platform received the 2007 Product of the Year Award from Technology Marketing Corporation's (TMC®) Customer Interaction Solutions magazine as well as the 2008 Editors' Choice Award from Redmond magazine, the authoritative, independent voice of the Microsoft IT community. A venture-backed company, OpenSpan is headquartered in Alpharetta, GA. More information about OpenSpan is located online at www.openspan.com.
Date - 23/01/2008
