Accurate, Consistent, Accessible Data - FAST!

Up-to-the-Minute Data – Stakeholders seeking meaningful data get information in 2-5 minutes, rather than 2-5 days.

Fast Implementation – The reusability of maps and the move from expensive-to-maintain custom code enabled delivery in a tight window.

Accurate Unified Global Data View – Pervasive® Data Integrator™ provides automated bidirectional daily synchronization from Salesforce and a SQL database, so all field-entered information is fully available to headquarters each day and IiP Centres have a unified view of lead and account information.

Reusability – Thanks to the flexibility of Pervasive Data Integrator, the IT department can continue to deliver additional value to IiP. They plan to use Pervasive Data Integrator for several projects including providing up-to-date information via a self-service portal, so their client companies can directly access and benchmark their organization’s progress against the IiP Standard.

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Needed: Lead sharing, better reporting, data consistency

On 1st April 2010, ownership of the Investors in People framework and brand moved from Investors in People UK to the UK Commission for Employment and Skills (UKCES). The UK Commission provides independent advice to the government to help the UK become a world-class leader in productivity, employment and skills. The UK Commission is now responsible for developing and maintaining the integrity of the Investors in People Standard and frameworks. This includes managing the licenses of the Investors in People Centres, promoting the frameworks, and quality assuring the service delivery.

The aim of the UK Commission is to improve the productivity of the UK workforce by providing a framework that any organisation can adopt, irrespective of size or type of company. This standard helps improve business performance and competitiveness through a planned approach to setting and communicating business objectives and developing people to meet these objectives.

Part of the UK Commission’s responsibility is developing and maintaining a central database of information on organisations that implement the UK Commission Standard. The thoroughness and accuracy of the data coming from partner-operated UK Delivery Centres to its headquarters is important, as the data drives decision-making for licensing and official recognition of practitioners. It allows monitoring of partners’ performance relative to target performance goals and provides this information to customers. In addition, the UK Commission needs complete, current data to provide accurate reports to sponsoring bodies and government ministers regarding its performance.

The UK Commission elected to implement Salesforce as a means to give the Delivery Centres the ability to enter a range of data themselves. It would also allow the UK Commission to efficiently share leads with the field-based centres. At the same time, they wanted to take the opportunity to improve data visibility and consistency and to create better reporting by integrating the numerous data types from the independent Delivery Centres into Salesforce. The UK Commission needed a proven, easy-to-maintain and reliable product so salesforce.com recommended that they call Pervasive Software. After evaluating a number of other options, the UK Commission selected Pervasive Data Integrator.

Three weeks to pull together thousands of records from 13 different locations into Salesforce

The various Delivery Centres used to provide monthly data in CSV formats to the organisation headquarters, and the data then had to be imported using a custom-built system. The IT team would spend several days per month preparing monthly and quarterly reports for its board of directors. Meanwhile, data related to potential and existing customers was updated inconsistently – sometimes entered by the Delivery Centre and sometimes by the UK Commission staff based on information arriving by email or telephone from the Delivery Centres.

Multiple disparate data feeds analyzed, transformed and loaded

Pervasive understood that this project needed rapid speed to implementation, and was confident Pervasive Data Integrator could deliver results. The Pervasive Professional Services Group jumped in to help the commission’s IT group meet their deadline.

They integrate data from 13 separate Delivery Centres, which were outside the Commission, with the Commission customer resource management system hosted by salesforce.com. Integration now takes place on a one-to-one basis between the Salesforce Objects and their corresponding tables in SQL Server. Now all Salesforce objects are synchronised with a complete copy stored at the Commission corporate site as a SQL Server database. This copy of Salesforce data is presented through a self-service portal reporting from the central SQL Server database. Selected objects in the Commission instance of Salesforce are integrated with individual Quality Centre views of the data. The UK Commission’s partners now have the opportunity to access and update their own information.

Now the UK Commission can pull reports on a real-time basis from Salesforce to provide information to management and the key stakeholders. The data is used in a large number of internal and customer-facing web and reporting applications. Nightly synchronisation ensures that data is current, complete, and uniform across all Delivery Centres. Before, extraction alone was a 3-4 week process.

Lower costs, more control over data

The UK Commission improved its data quality, reporting effectiveness and team efficiency under a tight timeline by using Pervasive. Ease of use and powerful functionality fed speed to completion.

Pervasive has allowed the UK Commission to create reusable maps to significantly reduce deployment time. The UK Commission was able to design one process for one Delivery Centre that could be readily reused across all 13 Delivery Centres. The entire integration process can now be managed by one employee.

The results of this Salesforce integration are a progression to automation, better quality assurance, improved management and monitoring of its partners, stronger lead generation, and rock-solid reporting that meets the exacting standards of stakeholders.

Marek Kluczynski sums up the experience: “Utilising Pervasive Data Integrator allows us to quickly integrate partners’ databases with Salesforce without the need for complex custom processes, reducing long-term costs and giving us control over data. The UK Commission has also been able to build on the robust Pervasive technology and use the platform for other projects without the need to purchase additional software.”

He adds, “We’ve been able to build web applications. We’ve been able to do a lot of things that we wouldn’t have been able to do without Pervasive.”

More access, more automation, more intelligence

There is a Phase 2 to UKCES’s automation process implementation. UKCES replicated a SQL copy of the Salesforce data, which in turn is presented through a self-service portal reporting from the central SQL Server database. UKCES’s partners now have the opportunity to access and update their own information.

In a planned Phase 3, the IT department will leverage Pervasive integration to create a data warehouse. This central hub of information will be built in Salesforce, with Pervasive providing the integration framework.

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