Working With Us

Learn how we added value to organizations just like yours.

Our goal is to leverage technology investments by adding value. See how we accomplished this for some of our clients.

WorldSolve's solutions enable your company to take command of its technology. We incorporate experience, proven methodologies, and a creative approach to meet the unique requirements of each customer. Our case studies provide a glimpse of what we do and how we do it.

Employee Compensation

WorldSolve custom application improves communication between Human Resources department and employees.

The Challenge

To enhance communication with employees and highlight the extensive array of its benefit offerings, the Human Resources (HR) department wanted a compensation statement that provided a summary of payroll and benefits information received by each employee. While their current Human Resources Payroll (HRPR) system contained the necessary data, no application existed that could extract the data and generate a summary statement for each employee. The customer chose WorldSolve to develop a customized compensation statement. Although many HR service providers offer this type of service, WorldSolve presented a clear advantage with its automated solution that met several key requirements:

To automate the generation of the summary statement.
To minimize data entry and additional work effort by customer personnel.
To provide integration with the existing Human Resources Information System (HRIS).

The Solution

WorldSolve developed a comprehensive solution for the HR department, delivering a custom application to:

Automate data extraction from the existing HRIS.
Aggregate and summarize the extracted data.
Generate the customized statements.

Working closely with the HR department, WorldSolve designed its solution with a modular approach to ensure ease of maintenance as reporting requirements change. WorldSolve designed the compensation statement layout to meet the identified requirements and convey the information in a simple and precise format. In addition, WorldSolve's system provides flexibility, giving the HR department the option to print a single statement or all statements, as well as generate a summary report for upper management to show the allocation of benefit costs for the entire workforce.

The Benefits

WorldSolve's custom application has enabled the customer's HR department to present a "snapshot" of benefit information to over 700 employees. The system also offers a high level audit of the payroll system, allowing the company to more easily identify and correct errors. By developing a flexible, automated solution that integrates with the company's HRPR and HRIS systems, WorldSolve has helped the customer gather data more efficiently, perform calculations more quickly and accurately, and enhance communication with employees through customized reporting.

The solution provides the following benefits:

Automated "one click" system providing simple operation.
A simple, user-friendly, and easy to understand statement.
Improved data integrity and calculation accuracy.

Forecasting and Budgeting

Real Estate Company transforms unstructured business information into competitive advantage with WorldSolve's Forecasting and Budgeting System.

The Challenge

Faced with a growing business and an inadequate financial planning system, a leading Real Estate company decided to review its forecasting and budgeting process. The outcome of the review was overwhelming. While the company had grown steadily over the past several years, its planning infrastructure was no longer sufficient. The model in use could not keep pace with the company's growth and hampered its strategic planning efforts.

At the time, completion of the budget cycle required an estimated 1,230 MS Excel workbooks and 16,000 worksheets. The average size of a workbook was 846 KB. The sheer volume and disparate budget files caused several issues with the existing budget model and process, including:

Auditing and reporting of budget assumptions was not possible.
Integration with ERP systems was at an aggregated level, making it difficult to review or validate amounts.
Custom reporting and analysis was not possible.
Consolidation could not be done until the end of the budget process, thus delaying the review process.
Integration between different lines of business did not exist.
The time needed to complete a budget was too long, due to the number of parties involved and the number of manual steps required.
Allocations were difficult to review across multiple business centers.
Short and long range forecasting were disparate from the budget process.
In addition, the company had to maintain an intricate filing system to organize the vast amount of information and also had to support all the many file formats utilized throughout the process.
Most of the company's information was not structured data, and thus could not be managed using traditional analysis tools.
The existing system, complicated and not user-friendly, resulted in a prolonged cycle.

The Solution

To meet the requirements of the new Forecasting and Budgeting System (FBS), the company engaged WorldSolve to do the following:

Define the system requirements.
Recommend a buy vs. build decision, which involved the evaluation of 7 different packaged solutions.
Design and configure the solution.
Integrate the system with the ERP and Payroll systems.
Deploy the system by training over 200 end users.
Establish a help-desk to support end user questions.
Perform project management responsibilities.

The FBS, which involved the configuration and implementation of Hyperion Pillar with a Citrix Metaframe environment, has given users secure access to business information from anywhere via an Internet browser. In addition, WorldSolve developed a web-based application that allows end users to enter speculative leasing assumptions and quickly enter lease data in a user-friendly environment. WorldSolve used Hyperion Application Link to integrate the company's ERP, Payroll Systems and web-based lease assumption application with Hyperion Pillar, providing an integrated, user-friendly solution.

The Benefits

With the new forecasting and budgeting system provided by WorldSolve, the company has significantly improved the budgeting and forecasting processes as well as strategic decision-making. The FBS integrated both processes, enabling the company to reduce the budget cycle from 8 months to 4 months - cutting the cycle time by 50%. The process built around the new system has allowed end users to assume the role of a "Value Creator." By reducing the number of manual entries, users can focus on analysis and planning. The solution has given the company increased data accuracy and integrity by reducing the number of data sources. It simplified the audit and review process for approvers and shifted accountability to the end users, allowing each user to easily create and manage the budgeting and forecasting processes. Most importantly, the end users accepted the FBS as a value-oriented approach.

Through the use of WorldSolve's services, the company has increased efficiency throughout its entire enterprise, reduced costs associated with the budgeting and forecasting processes, and generated a quicker time frame to make critical business decisions.

Benefit Enrollment

The Challenge

Facing an open enrollment deadline for over 700 employees, the HR department needed an immediate solution to accommodate employee benefit elections for the upcoming year. Their existing process involved many manual steps.

Invoices to carriers and new employee enrollment forms were manually created.
Information gathering for all forms required manual retrieval of data from multiple sources.
Keeping the various systems synchronized was a manual process.

The current open enrollment process, inefficient and vulnerable to data entry errors, resulted in incorrect benefit elections and inaccurate employee demographics. WorldSolve was selected to develop a solution to automate the open enrollment process — from the generation of the requisite forms to the preparation of carrier invoices.

The Benefits

By automating the open enrollment process, WorldSolve has improved the customer's ability to manage benefit enrollment efficiently and accurately throughout the year. With WorldSolve's solution, the company has reduced the time needed to assemble monthly carrier invoices by 80%. The solution, which offers a one-click data refresh from the company's HRPR system, enables the company to easily provide each employee with customized open enrollment forms and can generate the forms and confirmations on demand, in real-time.

The solution's benefits are summarized below:

Through automation, increased the accuracy of information and calculations.
Significantly reduced the number of systems used.
Reduced the cycle time for generating enrollment forms and confirmations by 60%.
Reduced the cycle time for creating invoices by 80%.

Human Resources department saves time and improves information accuracy with an automated Open Enrollment system from WorldSolve.

The Solution

WorldSolve's solution focused on two main areas. First, simplifying form pre-population — the process of retrieving an employee's existing benefit elections for upcoming verification or modification in the new open enrollment period. Second, automating the generation of carrier invoices to reduce cycle time and improve accuracy.

WorldSolve developed a custom application to:

Automate the retrieval of employee demographics and current benefit elections from the Human Resources Payroll (HRPR) system to pre-populate open enrollment forms.
Store and manage benefit plan rates for the carriers used by the company, to enable calculation of coverage amounts and premiums.
Create online "calculators" for benefit coverage amounts and premium rates, giving benefit specialists the ability to perform "what if" scenarios.
Generate benefit-related detail and summary reports.
Provide export functions, enabling the data to be used in other systems.
Generate invoices for a wide range of carriers, including medical insurance, dental and vision insurance, disability and life insurance carriers.
WorldSolve worked closely with the customer to define an improved open enrollment process, delivering a solution that included extensive automation, significantly reduced the number of data input sources, and eliminated the need to maintain multiple systems.

401k Provider Administrator

Corporation improves 401(k) management with enterprise integration solution from WorldSolve.

The Challenge

After engaging a new service provider to manage and administer its 401(k) retirement plan, the customer needed to streamline the process of transmitting employee elections and demographics to the provider every pay period. The customer chose WorldSolve to develop a solution to extract the information from the company's Human Resources Payroll System (HRPR) and transform it to meet the provider's requirements.

The solution had to overcome several challenges:

Locate and extract the correct data from the company's HRPR system.
Transform and format the extracted data according to the provider's specifications.
Automate the extraction and transmittal processes, to increase efficiency and information accuracy.

The Solution

WorldSolve developed a solution that prepares the customer's payroll data and transmits it to the 401(k) service provider. During the requirements analysis phase, in which WorldSolve documented the complete process from data export to assembly and transmittal, WorldSolve uncovered additional requirements not identified initially: the need for data validation after the export from the HRIS but before transmittal to the service provider, as well as summary reports for management, to facilitate effective record keeping and to provide accurate, up-to-date information.

Based on the identified requirements, WorldSolve designed, tested, and implemented a solution that:

Uses export templates to extract data from the Human Resources Payroll System (HRPR).
Generates audit reports to facilitate the analysis and validation of exported data via a custom application.
Automates data transmission to the service provider through customization of an existing communication application.

WorldSolve leveraged the customer's existing systems to deliver the solution, extending those systems with customized applications and enhancements. Through documentation and training, WorldSolve provided knowledge transfer and facilitated simplified system maintenance for the company.

The Benefits

WorldSolve's solution has streamlined the entire process, from data extraction to transmittal. By customizing existing systems where applicable, and by implementing custom developed solutions to fill voids, WorldSolve's solution added value to the customer's technology investments. The customer's HR department can seamlessly transmit 401(k) data in an efficient and accurate manner, ensuring timely application of employee investment allocations.

The solution has provided the following benefits:

Reduced the number of systems used.
Reduced electronic transmittal cycle time.
Improved information accuracy.

Accounts Payable Workflow

WorldSolve helps Corporation modernize Accounts Payable function with an electronic document management and Workflow Solution.

The Challenge

A large national company with regional offices in 14 major US cities recognized the need to improve efficiency and reduce costs related to the processing of Accounts Payable (A/P) invoices. Through an aggressive expansion campaign, the company had quadrupled in size in just over 24 months. The A/P processes, once defined for a smaller regional company, had been forced into place across the country and had become a significant business challenge.

Centrally located corporate offices provided finance and accounting services including back office A/P processing for all locations. Through a largely manual, labor intensive and cumbersome process, the company handled roughly 10,000 invoices per month at an estimated cost of $38.00 per invoice.

Challenges experienced by the company are highlighted below:

Invoices were delivered directly to the individuals that procured the goods and services. As a result, the company had no way of tracking costs until invoice batches arrived in the A/P Department and were entered into the ERP system.
Individuals that received invoices sometimes put off processing them until the last minute. In a rush to get payments to suppliers, invoice batches were mailed to the corporate offices via expensive overnight delivery.
Manual re-keying of hard-to-read handwritten coding instructions caused data entry errors.
The A/P staff grew to over 30 people, and the cost of back office A/P invoice processing grew to an unacceptable level.
The monthly A/P close cycle had to begin 10 to 12 days before the end of the month to ensure that invoices were recorded in time to allow subsequent month-end processing.
With several hundred individuals from the regional offices indicating their approval by initialing the invoices, the company expended extra effort to ensure approval authenticity.

The Solution

WorldSolve helped the company identify existing challenges and design an integrated solution to modernize its A/P invoice processing functions. With a comprehensive understanding of the business requirements and a focus on efficiency gains and cost reductions, WorldSolve worked with the company to deploy technologies and integrate systems that enabled real process improvements.

The Optika Acorde suite of document imaging, electronic document management, and workflow automation applications was selected as the key enabling technology. Company-wide A/P processes were analyzed, redesigned and mapped into a distributed workflow model. Custom data entry forms were configured to capture and validate the required information. Interface requirements to and from the company's ERP system were identified and the necessary integration was developed. Figure 1 provides a high-level illustration of the solution.

Accounts Payable Workflow Solution

Figure 1 - Accounts Payable Workflow Solution

The solution has enabled many A/P process improvements. The A/P Department now receives, scans, and electronically stores all supplier invoices. Invoices contain enough information to enable the department to electronically route invoices to the individuals that procure the goods or services.

Regional offices receive invoices electronically and input the necessary account coding and payment handling information directly into a workflow form. The system provides real-time validation against the company's ERP system and electronically routes validated invoices to the individuals responsible for approval and payment authorization. When a user approves an invoice, his name is stored as part of the electronic package and is used to confirm its authenticity. Approved invoices are routed to an automated interface between the workflow system and the company's ERP system.

Original invoice documents are stored electronically and can be retrieved through easy-to-use search capabilities available to all users.

The Benefits

Capitalizing on WorldSolve's in-depth technical experience and disciplined project management practices, the company has significantly improved its A/P invoice processing functions. Key improvements are highlighted below:

All invoices received by the company are accounted for from the minute they arrive. The average number of days required to record invoices in the company's ERP system has been reduced by more than 20 days. As a result, the company's ability to monitor and report real-time expenditures has improved.
With a focus on the procedural compliance of each vendor, the company has placed the ability to receive timely payments directly in the vendor's hands. After four months, more than 85% of vendor invoices were in compliance with the company's new invoicing requirements. Postage costs related to the internal delivery of invoices are down nearly five thousand dollars per month and late payment fees are very infrequent.
Individuals responsible for procurement have full control over the quality of the invoice coding details and have accepted accountability. Data entry errors have been virtually eliminated and invalid payments have decreased significantly.
The A/P staff has been reduced by 10 people and invoice processing costs have dropped by more than 30%.
With confidence building, the company is preparing to shift the A/P close cycle forward between 6 to 8 days and improve the timeliness of its financial reporting information.
The easily accessible electronic document repository has eliminated the need for multiple invoice copies. As needed, individuals from across the organization can retrieve and view invoice images on demand.
Electronically authenticated approvals have enabled the company to easily validate and audit invoices as they are submitted for payment.
Overall invoice processing cycle times have been significantly reduced. At any moment, the company can assess the age of every invoice within the pipeline and take action accordingly.