Case Study: Miles

The challenge

Miles works across many industries providing a wide range of IT consultancy services. Often the bid team was occupied spending time on updating CVs and formatting them for bids and tenders. The CVs was kept in a folder structure and was rarely update by the consultants themselves. Having the CVs in a cloud solution was an obvious choice for Miles. To solve this problem, CV Partner had most of the functionality needed out of the box. However, Miles also wanted additional functionality to highlight the skills, experiences and industries Miles and its consultants had worked with over time. Often an overview of this was needed for the bid and tender documents either as a list or as a matrix, often including each office or skill sorted into rows and columns highlighting the broad range of experiences the company had.

Since the CVs had most of this information, but not a good way to present it at the time, Miles decided to use the built-in API for creating their own custom solution based on a nightly data sync from the CV Partner master-database. Since Miles has several year’s experience creating custom software integrations, building the software was relatively straight forward. The application was named “Mforce” as it was a gateway to see the aggregated view of the workforce of Miles.

What does the Mforce integration do?

Mforce gathers data from the CV Partner API and puts it in a structured database allowing Miles employees to run certain reports and generate some tables of information. The information has a UI which allows anyone in Miles to access the information Each employee can manage tags which is then displayed in a visually appealing way. One of the use cases is the competency matrix. What this does is answer commonly asked questions amongst bid and sales managers in the consulting industry, namely: How many people do you have in each location with at least X years experience with X? In this case the empty fields could be anything, for example, how many people do you have with minimum 5 years experience building front-end HTML5 apps? In this case, the Mforce easily builds a table including each location and the number of employees tagged with HTML5 and frontend respectively. The user can click the number for each location, and the list of who this is can be revealed. The software then saves time by automating this previously very manual task of counting the number of years’ experience and skills across CVs and references, and adding it in a table. Having reliable, up to date information helped Miles submit and win more tenders and offers.

In addition, the Mforce webapp shows data such as “trending industries” – a report showing in which industries the clients with the most recent projects are, and compare this with historic data. This is relevant as a KPI for management if you have strategic goal to focus certain markets, or to measure if marketing activities has paid off. Another feature was a quick overview of where each consultant is stationed currently, based on the most recent project in their CV, which is used as a tool for the employees to get an overview of where their colleagues are working.  Also, Mforce allowed management to get reports on recently updated projects, experiences and certifications as well as getting reports on this on a regular basis. Email reminder tool was also added to help people update their information in CV Partner which was then mirrored to the Mforce application

What is an API?
API stands for Application Programming Interface and is a way to access the features and procedures created inside an application, without having to install, maintain or even have access to the application itself. The API is often documented explaining what is needed to create function calls and access to each feature. The API can be configured to run at a given, fixed or regular time interval, or it can be triggered by another application. The API needs to be designed and implemented in a secure way to make sure information is kept safe. Therefore, unique API keys are used for authentication and traffic management. The traffic using the API is also monitored, and you can add additional security features if needed. In the case of Miles Mforce application, the data did not have to be current, and the architect therefore decided to instead to a nightly data dump to get the latest relevant information from the CVs.

Why CV Partner?

Kjartan explains: “We like to use well designed cloud based Web-apps, CV Partner was the ideal choice as it allowed us to get started quickly, and it offered exactly the features we needed. The fact that the API was available allowed us to use our own skills and experiences to design something of value to our sales team and consultants themselves. Without CV Partner we would not have as much and rich data as we have today and could never have made Mforce”

The Results

Today, Miles save a lot of time using Mforce and CV Partner. The CV Partner solution is a part of Miles internal onboarding procedure and all employees have much greater ownership to their CV. The sales team and bid managers have always up-to-date available to assist them selling and marketing Miles consultancy services. As a result we can deliver higher quality bids and tenders, resulting in more business to the company.  Also, CV Partner helps each employee have more control over their skills, and get more relevant challenges.