Life Skills Integrated Attendance and Reporting Application

Project

Custom Integrated Attendance and Reporting System Application

Project Requirements

Respected organization with more than 45 years of service, and accredited by the Commission on Accreditation of Rehabilitation Facilities (CARF), is a service provider for people who need assistance with employment or life skills due to a disability. Due to the nature of their work, much of the operating budget comes from grants and contracts with the Minnesota Department of Human Services, other health providers, and disabilities-focused organizations. Using an older database application for tracking client attendance and generating reports for their various sponsor organizations, they realized that they needed to update the system and speed up the process if they were going to be able to offer more services and help more people in need.

Result

Intertech helped the client create an integrated attendance and reporting system that cut monthly processing times down from a week to less than an hour.

Overview

Previously, this was a process that took their employees nearly a week to complete every month. Each funding organization requires a slightly different reporting format, so employees were spending time formatting the data and making sure the correct data was in each report. Additionally, attendance records need to be audited for accuracy and reviewed by program coordinators.

In the past, the organization had engaged another software consultancy firm but were frustrated with the waterfall methodology, all-at-once delivery of the product, and lack of feedback cycle. Soon after contacting Intertech, they soon realized the benefits of a well run Agile process and a team of developers with proven experience using the methodology. With Intertech at the helm, their needs were met with a process that let the customer guide development as they desired.

The core application launched within six months of starting the project. After implementing the core web application, Intertech’s consultants shifted the agile development priorities to creating automatic invoices and reimbursement requests for their various funding organizations. As the project progressed, the Minnesota Department of Human Services (MN DHS) announced they’d require reimbursement submissions to be broken out daily on invoices. With Intertech’s agile approach, the team was able to change development priorities to comply with and take advantage of MN DHS’s electronic submission capability and create an export that could be used to submit to MN DHS’s automated submissions process.

To complete the process, Intertech added support for PDF creation of organization-specific invoices for all their funding organizations.

Thanks to Intertech’s agile approach and experienced team of consultants, the client’s needs were met even with change-requirements dictated midstream.