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Critical Issue
The IS staff of the State of Kansas HR department desired to automate several manual processes. The most important of these being handling requests for unemployment benefits. In their current process, these were handled by mail, visits to the office, or via phone and then hand entered into the benefits processing software. This obviously took time and cost money – what they wanted was for the unemployed to be able to file for the benefits themselves over the internet and also for data collected to be dynamically fed into the benefits application.
Alto’s Solution
Alto provided analysis, customized training, and mentoring to automate manual business processes using BizTalk server. This also included an architectural review and analysis and recommendation of a system which could handle the following:
- A heavy transaction load.
- The ability to seamlessly handle requests generated from their website. This was done using a Biztalk http receiver agent.
- The capability to feed the requests into the benefits application. Biztalk’s main goal is to integrate and using a file export combined with calls to VB6 based COM components, the benefits application was tightly integrated with Biztalk and therefore with the web requests and other down-stream applications.
- Perform decision making based on business rules. One example is based on a return code from a call to an application, to decide if a different processing application should be called or not. Using BizTalk’s Orchestration designer, Alto was able to design and implement several scenarios of business logic which called out to other applications and to the file system based on results of the varying processes. The Orchestrations are easily modifiable to change or add business rules without having to compile code or change the rest of the integration.
- Send the person a response email. This was done using BizTalk’s internal support for sending SMTP email.
Business Benefit
The State of Kansas HR rolled out a system able to accommodate user requests directly from the website with the functionality to tie directly into their ensuing processing applications. This automated several processes while removing the need for in-house visits and data entry.
Technologies Used
- Visual Basic 6
- ASP
- COM+
- Viso
- .Net Servers: BizTalk, SQL Server 2000, Windows 2000
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