“The sooner information is relayed, the more valuable it is to our customers. That’s why our corporate tagline is ‘Insight in an Instant,’ and that’s what this solution provides.”

Steven Foster, President, Business Controls, Inc.

Business Controls, Inc., provides services and technology to organizations seeking to mitigate the risk of workplace misconduct. To address support and maintenance problems, the company worked with Fujitsu Consulting to replace its first-generation anonymous incident reporting system, based on Java, Sybase, and UNIX technologies, with one based on Microsoft® technologies. The benefits include a return on investment in less than one year and a 30 percent rise in revenues.

Business Needs

Business Controls, Inc., (BCI) is a corporate consulting and risk-mitigation firm specializing in the discovery, analysis, resolution, and further prevention of losses that can occur from workplace misconduct.  BCI provides services in psychology, research, investigation, and education, as well as a web-based anonymous incident reporting system (AIRS) that enables whistleblowers to report incidents.  

Given the cost of litigation and potential damages arising from auditing concerns, harassment, theft, substance abuse, and similar problems, AIRS solutions are emerging as a top priority for board-level decision makers worldwide. Accordingly, being able to offer its customers a powerful, secure, and easily extensible AIRS solution is a top priority for BCI.  

Recently, however, the company faced challenges with its first-generation AIRS solution, which supported corporations and universities, respectively, with two applications running on separate databases based on Java, Sybase, and UNIX technologies. “The dual-database approachwas complex and costly to maintain in an industry where availability is non-negotiable,” explains Steven Foster, President  at BCI.  “Moreover, retargeting the solution for new vertical sectors required extensive coding, for both functional and presentation enhancements.”

To make matters worse, BCI customers were seeking more comprehensive reporting capabilities and an easier user interface. Yet, after months of development efforts, at least one attempt to address these concerns had failed.

Solution

For help, BCI executives enlisted Fujitsu Consulting, whose representatives convinced them to replace the AIRS solution, as well as the company’s entire IT infrastructure, with a new approach based on Microsoft® server software and developer technologies.

Working in concert with BCI technical professionals, consultants from Fujitsu used the Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005 development system and Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005 to consolidate the solution and code base into a single configurable application running against a single database. The developers also used Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services to enable aggregation as well as statistical analysis, filters, and the multiselect drop-down capabilities, to simplify user drilldown into the database.

To help safeguard the extremely sensitive information in the database and the identities of the parties reporting it, the developers used SQL Server 2005 data encryption to disguise logon information and passwords, Microsoft ASP.NET to help prevent cross-site scripting attacks, forms authentication to restrict site access, and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) for all data transmission. Finally, to make the solution customizable for new vertical sectors without the need for new code, the developers used SQL Server 2005 application themes, skin files, style sheets, configuration files, and Master Pages.

Benefits

Known as MySafeWorkplace®, and including an enhancement known as the MySafeDashboard™ Metrics Reporting Tool, the new AIRS solution has provided significant technology and business benefits for BCI and its customers. 

• Rapid development. Developers migrated and created the full-featured solution with four full-time-equivalent staffers in about 14 weeks.  By contrast, as Foster points out, “To produce a similarly powerful, reliable, and secure solution under the prior Java, Sybase, and UNIX environment, even with no migration required, would have taken well over a year.”
• Problem-free deployment. After installing new hardware the day before, BCI made the new solution available to its customers worldwide in just four hours, while maintaining the 99.999 percent availability required by its service level agreements.
• Stellar performance. BCI guarantees its customers a three-minute turnaround between the time an incident is entered into the solution and the time it is reported to the designated parties. With the new solution, the turnaround is typically closer to three seconds.
• Increased revenue. Before the new solution, BCI targeted customers with fewer than 10,000 employees. “But now, we have landed several much larger accounts, including one with 250,000 employees,” Foster reports. “We also have reached more customers in the European Union in the first six months after launching the solution than we did in the previous four years.” For these reasons, BCI is on track for a 30 percent rise in solution revenues the first year after deployment.
• 
  Decreasing costs. Thanks to the solution’s improved reporting and user-presentation capabilities, call-center costs are down by 50 percent. As a side benefit, with migration of the entire BCI IT infrastructure to Microsoft products and technologies, related support and maintenance savings enabled the company to recoup its investment in the new solution in just 10 months.
• 
  Expanding opportunities. Previously, BCI needed up to a year to repurpose its AIRS solution for a new vertical sector, but with the new solution such work is done in days. Repurposing the solution to target healthcare, for example, required just a day and a half and minimal technical involvement.

 

Opportunities have expanded for Fujitsu, too.  In just a few months after deployment of the BCI solution, Fujitsu secured similar infrastructure-migration and solutiondevelopment projects representing more than $225,000 in new revenues. “The market for AIRS solutions represents the crucial convergence of IT and corporate security, and we are now offering the only such solution on a Microsoft platform,” says Craig Andrie, Vice President and Service Director, Fujitsu Consulting. “Business opportunities are promising.”