Mindbeam Technologies Streamlines Telecom Departments by Automating Service Order Updates

Mindbeam Technologies Kwesi Gumbs, Consultant

Background

Founded in 2000, Mindbeam Technologies is a contract IT services company that writes custom software, develops web interfaces, and provides automated solutions for everyday business tasks. They are based in Birmingham, Alabama and provide effective solutions for repetitive order systems.

The Challenge

Mindbeam Technologies was initially approached by a nationwide telecommunications firm to streamline its service order processing. With offices all across the U.S. and no central database system, the separate entities and departments each had their own independent order processing systems. There was no link or system to share common information that would reflect updates in all offices. The telecommunications firm needed the information to interface across all systems without replacing them. Kwesi Gumbs, a software consultant at Mindbeam, was named to lead the project. With the help of web architect Marshall Mooney, Gumbs set out to evaluate the problem.

"As with any problem, time and money were significant factors," mentioned Gumbs. "Our original thought was to develop a new application from scratch, but we only had a small window of time. Coupled with the labor costs that would be involved, it just wasn't a viable option. We needed to figure out a quick solution, something that would involve rapid application development."

With so many external entities, no central database system, little time to work, and a limited budget, Gumbs had his work cut out for him. Was there a product on the market that could work within the parameters he had available to him?

The Solution

After a brief search, Gumbs came across AutoMate. He set up AutoMate to log into each external system, interfacing the reports for the individual systems, and automatically update systems to reflect the most recent information. AutoMate pulled individual records and their corresponding permanent information, and changed each one to reflect the most recently updated record.

Gumbs remarked, "With AutoMate, each external system runs a report against the others and defines what is not matching. It then creates a report based on figures that are inconsistent or conflicting and updates the records accordingly. By using this approach, which employs AutoMate's automation capabilities to keep all records up-to-date, we had to write very little code on the external systems and could access the system through the user interface."

The Benefits

"Without AutoMate, my team and I would have to manually access each system and review the reports. Rather than sifting through the thousands upon thousands of records ourselves, we're saving days by letting AutoMate do the work for us," remarked Gumbs. "One person attempting an update for a single record would take several minutes. With AutoMate, the process only takes a couple of seconds."

Gumbs says the amount of time saved doesn't stop there. AutoMate has enabled Mindbeam to spend more time on core operations, developing custom solutions for its clients.

"If we hadn't found AutoMate, we would have had to spend both time and money hiring more people to manage the system," says Gumbs. "We've set AutoMate to start up early in the morning and turn off late at night, which makes our scheduling process quite a bit easier."