Technology

One of Changepoint PSA's key advantages is the way our product and technology has evolved. In 1996 Changepoint PSA was  the world's first integrated Professional Services Automation solution. This early client/server product was used worldwide by a number of companies to manage their end-to-end services business.

When the time came to transform the Changepoint PSA solution from its original client-server architecture to an n-tier Web-based application, our R&D team had the luxury of a full scope "blueprint" of the desired solution as a basis for rebuilding.

Without the distractions of acquired bits and pieces, Changepoint PSA has organically grown in house, in as much as it seamlessly integrates all of the critical business processes and data of a services organization by leveraging a single database architecture.

Driving Principles Behind the Changepoint PSA Architecture

The primary goal of the Changepoint PSA software is to allow our customers to automate all of their service delivery business processes efficiently. Aside from the required functionality being present, applications of this class must have a number of other critical attributes.

Role-based Access: No matter what an employee's role, be it manager or junior consultant or administrator, each must have an appropriately tailored user interface and access. Changepoint PSA enables administrators to configure any combination of over 180 features into assignable roles.

Mobility: Services staff are nomadic. Software must provide a range of mobility options for the workforce to choose from. Changepoint PSA not only allows access from anywhere by browser, but also provides a disconnected browser, Pocket PC and Pocket PC phone clients for those needing to work off line.

Back Office to the Front Office: Even processes such as invoicing are front office operations in a services organization. Provision must be made for front line, customer-facing staff to be involved in the workflow of many traditionally back-office processes such as invoicing.

External Participation in Business Processes: With Internet connectivity now ubiquitous, business applications can now extend beyond the walls of the hosting organization to include third parties in business process. Changepoint PSA's architecture has included the ability to selectively include contractors, staffing vendors, job boards and customers in the staff acquisition and service delivery process.

Configurability vs. Customizability: Services organizations are dynamic. Supporting software must be flexible to the changing needs and structures of a business. Changepoint PSA's powerful configuration capabilities make many changes a simple matter of changing settings rather than custom development.

Global Support: Changepoint PSA is designed from the ground up to support large, multi-company, multi-language global organizations. Examples of global capabilities include support for global currencies and automated conversions, locale-sensitive date, numeric and language preferences, VAT and recoverable taxes, taxation by location and time zone-driven SLA management. The application supports all global character sets through the Unicode encoding scheme. The user experience is user selectable and available in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, and Japanese.

Integration to other software: With existing investments in CRM or accounting solutions, many companies may want to augment what they already own with PSA. It is critical that integration be as fast and efficient as possible. Changepoint PSA, via a number of integration methods, can integrate with most anything a customer has currently deployed.

Network sensitivity: Many services organizations have staff distributed in areas where bandwidth may not be plentiful. Therefore, PSA software must not be bandwidth intensive. Changepoint PSA has undergone extensive testing to ensure the ultimate efficiency in network traffic.

Scalable Architecture and Functionality: Global services organizations require flexibility in deployment options in both technology and application functionality. Changepoint PSA has been architected to ensure the most choices possible in topology as well as supporting business functionality. Changepoint PSA runs on leading DBMS technologies from Microsoft.

Changepoint PSA Client Strategy

Changepoint PSA is a true "thin client" product. The standard Changepoint PSA user requires zero code on the desktop and can access the application from any Internet Explorer Browser. Changepoint PSA's role-based desktop is delivered and rendered on the fly, depending on the logged-in user rights, roles and language preference. The client utilizes DHTML, XML, VML and JavaScript technologies to provide a rich client experience without the need to install software on the desktop.

Off line users and users running MS Project on their desktop receive lightweight auto-installed objects that a common browser with these advanced capabilities. Off line data storage is accomplished through client-side XML record sets that are synchronized with the server over standard HTTP. Changepoint PSA's off line client requires no client side database engine or software container.

Performance & Scalability

Discussions on application scalability frequently become a comparison or benchmark exercise for the enabling technologies rather than the combination of the technologies and business application. Clearly, the larger challenge lies within the application's design and how efficiently it utilizes the underlying technology. The excellent performance and scalability that Changepoint PSA has achieved can be attributed to two primary factors: an optimized architecture and application functionality designed for large organizations.

System-level Performance & Scalability
Changepoint PSA customers have conducted extensive lab testing to ensure the application could scale to meet the demands of global deployments with many thousands of users.

Changepoint PSA's n-Tier architecture allows for the addition of incremental resources such as CPUs and memory as the organization grows and thus, loads on the system increase. Constant R&D pressure on low bandwidth performance and optimization of high volume processes such as login, time sheet submission, Microsoft Project synchronization and replication with our off line clients have resulted in excellent scalability and an efficient user experience.

Functional Performance & Scalability

Examples of Performance & Scalability gains achieved through functional maturity include the following:

• Support for n-Levels of organizational hierarchy provides access control granularity and improved context at the presentation level.
• All application tree views dynamically load each level as the user drills down, rather than all at once.
• Tree-view filtering with personal memory reduces network traffic by allowing a user to narrow in on what they need before delivering the information to the screen.
• Drop-down lists that contain large datasets (such as Customer and Resource lists) provide type-ahead searching to reduce the data returned to the browser.
• User-customizable dashboards with state memory provide dynamic loading to defer or eliminate unnecessary processing and network traffic.
• Automated invoicing, server-side pre-processing and batch printing high-volume invoice processing.
• Multi-company and multi-billing office support within a single deployment allows cascading business rules and centralized control over global deployments.

Extensibility

Changepoint PSA's configuration console and system management tool provides extensive configuration capability out of the box. Changepoint PSA customers have been able to map the solution to their existing business processes, to reduce deployment time and the need for customizations. Because the user interface is created real-time at login for each user, the configuration tool enables other applications and intranet content to plug and play directly into the Changepoint PSA application container. This third-party or custom application can even embrace the feature and role based security model of Changepoint PSA.

The key behind this console-level control is the database-centric design of the application. For example, every field label and text string used to define the application is maintained within the database. In addition to the powerful on-site terminology changes this enables, it also permits the application to dynamically present each user's interface in their language of choice.

In addition to third party tools, Changepoint PSA provides a number of options and tools for integrating with other applications. COM and XML APIs, an integrated Export Wizard and pre-built imports are all available directly from Changepoint PSA. We also provide a data dictionary and support third party and platform-native tools. Packaged, or near-packaged integration toolkits are available for integration to Microsoft Great Plains. Changepoint PSA has built integrations for most other ERP applications using the APIs described above.

Security

In order to ensure the highest levels of security, Changepoint PSA has submitted its application to a number of third party security audits.

With large global organizations in mind, Changepoint PSA provides complete configurable control over the application and your company's valuable data. Native support is provided for a number of authentication methods including, single sign-on authentication using NT domain accounts, single sign-on authentication using ActiveDirectory accounts, Digital Certificates and a standard authentication method where each user is assigned an application user account and password. Additional third party authentication services can be provided through customizations to provide customers the ability to tailor the authentication process based on internal systems or processes. SSL encryption can be enabled to ensure data is protected over the wire.

Security within the application is controlled by over 180 functional control points, workgroup-level access restrictions, workflow-based controls and, where even greater levels of control are required, record-level access control.