Hellen Keller International LogoClient: Helen Keller International

HKI is an international non-profit organization dedicated to preventing blindness, vision loss and malnutrition around the globe. Since 1915, the organization has been saving and improving the sight and lives of millions of people across Africa, Asia and the U.S.A.

The Challenge: Unstructured Processes And Disparate Systems

Helen Keller International was facing a problem that is prevalent in most large organizations—disparate systems. Netsuite’s unified database contained a specific dataset that certain employees needed to use daily in Microsoft Sharepoint. However, there was no way for these employees to search for that data within Sharepoint. The business process was extremely inefficient because employees had to manually retrieve data from Netsuite and enter it in Sharepoint dozens of times per day.

The HKI leadership soon realized that internal stakeholders were wasting hundreds of hours per month while switching between Netsuite and Sharepoint. To the organization, this was precious time that could have been spent driving one of the hundreds of HKI causes worldwide.

Looking For Solutions

The managers started looking for ways to automate the process. They researched platforms that enabled them to create their own workflows and IF-THEN triggers. The K2 platform seemed like a promising solution but it didn’t provide all the features that they needed.

At this point, it was clear that HKI had to find an experienced Netsuite developer who could solve the problem. Since there wasn’t such a professional on staff, management decided to seek a third-party vendor. That was when they stumbled upon another issue.

“The biggest challenge we’ve had with Netsuite related projects is finding consultants with the level of expertise to meet all the requirements in customizing the Netsuite product.”

—Christopher Ingeme, Owner, CPA Tech Partners

The Solution: A Custom Application To Integrate Netsuite And Sharepoint

Custom Netsuite Integration

HKI ended up engaging our services and we solved the problem with a tailor-made application.
For this project, we took advantage of the K2 workflow they had in place and we developed a custom solution on top of it. The result was a secure RESTlet that was invoked from K2 to fetch data from Netsuite and mapped the client’s business process completely.

The Result: Data And Automation At Everyone’s Fingertips

Technology has to automate business processes but sometimes it ends up stalling them. That’s what had happened in the case of Helen Keller International. After the CreationByte team implemented a custom application for them,

  • The HKI employees were able to search a specific Netsuite data set directly from the Sharepoint interface;
  • The employees were able to pull the data they needed securely and use it without leaving Sharepoint;
  • There was no need to no need to switch between applications;
  • The minutes and hours that each of these employees saved every day were invested in increasing the organization’s impact.

HKI’s feedback about the project:

We’ve used other Netsuite Consultants in the past but they were not able to meet all of our requirements in regard to customizing the product.
The CreationByte team came up with a very creative solution for us to workaround the limitations of the K2 workflow application.
There was no doubt that CreationByte were experts at Netsuite development. We would like to thank Greg, in particular, whose skill set far surpasses any other Netsuite Consultant we’ve used in the past. We would surely use CreationByte for any other Netsuite projects that we work on in the future.

—Christopher Ingeme, Owner, CPA Tech Partners

Categories: Case Studies

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