Client: St. Charles Engineering and Surveying
Web Address: www.stcharleseng.com

Executive Summary
St. Charles Engineering and Surveying (SCES) faced a hurdle when one of their proprietary applications suddenly stopped working and prevented the company from approving timesheets and invoicing clients. Because SCES did not have all of the source code or expertise necessary to fix the application, the company was forced to manually correct timesheets before invoices could be sent to their customers. This type of activity placed a burden on resources and made the company's billing process inefficient.

Rose International was referred to SCES in hopes that Rose professionals could help fix the application and resume normal billing activities.

Business Challenge
Both Rose and SCES were faced with the difficult situation of quickly getting the time approval and invoicing process working without having the source code necessary to fix the application. To meet this challenge, Rose met with SCES management and time approval staff to identify urgent business needs and to discuss alternatives. Once the problem was completely understood, Rose's experts presented SCES with alternatives ranging from buying third-party components to rebuilding specific components of the application. Factors such as immediate needs, future business goals and usability were taken into account, thereby leading the SCES President to choose the rebuilding option.

Once the decision was made to rebuild the application, Rose International still faced a challenge. Since business operations were being hampered, SCES asked that Rose quickly rebuild a portion of the application, ensure that time approval and invoicing operations were back to normal as quickly as possible, and keep expenses to a minimum.

The Rose International Solution
Rose determined that the challenges faced could be overcome by utilizing offshore development resources while having a local, dedicated analyst work directly with SCES. This analyst met with the user community to determine exactly what the application required and to ensure that the resulting design would efficiently fit into their business processes.

After gathering the requirements and agreeing with SCES on a Web-based design architecture, Rose communicated the needs to a dedicated offshore development team. This Rose team used the requirements and design specifications to quickly build and test the application. The customer's existing Web site was used as a template so that the resulting application would be branded as an SCES application. Quality checks were performed and the application was reviewed for performance and usability.

Value Derived
Rose International successfully implemented the time approval application and exceeded SCES' expectations. By delivering a quality solution on time and under budget, Rose was able to help the client resume normal business processes and improve the invoicing process. By utilizing the offshore team, SCES was able to recognize significant savings in both time and money. By choosing Rose International, the client enjoyed the benefits of a local IT analyst that understood their business and saved money by taking advantage of offshore IT experts.

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