Microsoft InfoPath

InfoPath allows organizations to connect people, information, and processes more effectively. You can gather information flexibly and efficiently in rich, dynamic forms and more effectively share, reuse, and repurpose information throughout your team or organization dramatically lowering administrative costs. The Rand Group tailors solutions to your business processes using Microsoft Office InfoPath to save time and money in the collection and processing of routine business information. InfoPath lets you define what information you wish to capture, to whom it is routed for processing and approval, and to which systems it automatically integrates once approved.

The variety of information captured on a daily basis in business manually is staggering. Forms are filled out, faxed, emailed, carried, and lost in routine processes. Often the information on the form is a restatement of data already contained in your existing systems with an added element requiring approval. The approvers may be out of town or otherwise inaccessible. If the information was instead captured in an integrated electronic form time would be saved, errors reduced, and most importantly processing time dramatically decreased.

Examples of processes ripe for automation include time and expense reporting, authorizations for capital expenditure, asset transfer requests, payroll and HR status or election changes, and material requisitions. In large organizations the time and costs to process these request manually are significant. InfoPath allows you to automate these processes with standard technology and reuse elements of the investment for future automation.

Information collected with InfoPath can be integrated with a broad range of business processes because InfoPath supports any customer-defined Extensible Markup Language (XML) schema and integrates with Web services. As a result, InfoPath can help you connect directly to organizational information and then act on it, which leads to greater business impact. The Rand Group's team of professionals can work with you to assess business processes with the most potential for return on investment from InfoPath automation. For more information contact The Rand Group at sales@randgrp.com