Over the last couple of years, there has been a lot of discussion about unified portal and employee self service portal. In spite of that, many customers are still unclear about how to proceed with implementation of unified portal / employee self-service in their environment. This is in part due to the multitude of available solutions that offer portions of the requirement.

One of the main challenges is that these solutions don't work well in isolation. Another is the level of integration and automation required.

One of the most frequent queried aspects is on ERP / HRMS solutions that have a self-service module which offer employee self-services. Some of the challenges identified in these platforms are:

  1. Complexity and the time taken to add / modify processes
  2. License costs
  3. Limitations in extending to organizational processes

The platform identified for the portal should be flexible enough to introduce new or modify existing processes seamlessly, without custom coding. The ideal solution will be a process-based one, with easy drag and drop functionality.

Unified Portal

The way in which we at Intertec Systems approach the unified portal is to provide a single platform through which employees can request services from different organizational departments. A visual representation of the service catalog with sufficient details of each service is provided.

This platform is capable of integrating with solutions already available. The respective departments continue to work using their respective solutions, however the unified platform can pull updates from these solutions and be presented to the user. The processes to be automated can be taken up as different phases based on the level of maturity of the organization.

Unified Portal for Customers and Vendors

The platform does not have to necessarily stop at the employee level. The same platform can be extended to customers and vendors with the help of process automation. We have successfully implemented the platform to effectively handle processes related to customers and vendors.

Customers and vendors normally try to contact the organizations to acquire information that is available in any of the internal systems. This information can be provided to customers / vendors through the portal, thereby reducing the number of calls received. The same experience can be provided through a mobile application as well.

Ivanti's Self Service Portal

We have successfully implemented Ivanti’s self-service vendor portal as an extension to the existing intranet portal for one of our retail customers and enabled the above said objectives.

Through this portal, vendors can search for their invoices, view payment status, invoice history, etc. It also helps customers to raise questions or concerns with the finance department if required.

Through this implementation with Ivanti, we were able to reduce the number of calls landing in to the finance department while increasing the productivity and improving the vendor experience.

About the Author:

ITIL Expert Certified Abhilash Augustine works as Senior Presales Consultant - ITSM with Intertec Systems, a leading IT solutions and services provider in GCC and headquartered in Dubai. He is an expert in consulting and implementation of ITSM, ITIL, Process Automation, Security, Asset Management, and other solutions for our customers.