Case Study: Setsko, Inc.

Before you dig into the chapter material, visit a company that just happens to have some challenges, presented in case study format, that require you to understand how the process of designing a solution begins.

Background

Setsko, Inc. is a small, 40-person, family-owned company that provides payroll and benefit outsourcing services. As the owners put it, "We are smaller than the big guys. In fact, we are smaller than the small guys." However, they recently acquired a new source of capital and are now putting in place a plan to grow.

Setsko offers a service to manage a client's entire compensation process: payroll checks, benefits enrollment, 401(k) management, healthcare insurance, and payroll deductions.

Problem Statement

Presently, Setsko is using a patchwork system that was first initiated when it had fewer clients and very little capital to work with. The system has been patched and augmented over the years, but is becoming labor-intensive and overly complicated. In addition, it doesn't meet Setsko's goals to be a bigger company, serving larger clients. Setsko is not able to take on new clients without expensive growth to its staff, to say nothing of the training and risk involved.

Although Setsko is presently based in a single location in Iowa, the owners would like to expand their company to selected cities throughout the midwestern United States.

Current System

There is no current system, per se. The staff is using a combination of Microsoft Office tools (mostly Word and Excel) and third-party software for contact management and accounting. Setsko has no application that ties all the information together, only processes.

Although Setsko does have a network, there are no servers in the company (except a file/print server). The little data it does have is stored in an Access database, but there is no graphical user interface (GUI) into the data; therefore, only a trusted few are allowed access.

Contact management software is used primarily to drive sales and account management efforts. Additionally, Setsko has an accounting package with one "account" for each employee it tracks. This package is used to manage disbursements and tax-related information (for example, Social Security withholding limits).

Setsko does have an Internet presence, but it is mostly static marketing content on a "hosted" Web site.

CEO

"We're using Excel to track clients and their employees, with one spreadsheet per company. We had a few macros created for us about a year ago. That helped, but we are growing beyond what we can do inside a spreadsheet. We do have the money to purchase new hardware and software. After conversations with some of my small-business peers, I've decided to focus on Microsoft .NET and SQL Server.

Our goal is to move quickly on this. The venture capitalist has agreed to fund a new software platform and is looking for some indication that we are doing what is necessary to grow the business. I would like the new system to be operational within six months. We need to implement an application that manages all our processes and stores the data in a more secure, robust place, such as SQL Server."

IT Manager

"My job title is misleading. I am the only person in my department, and my primary job is fixing broken PCs and ensuring that software updates get distributed. I have no expertise in any programming language, but one owner did tell me she is looking to hire a software development staff of three to four people for this effort. I only hope one of them knows how to administer a SQL Server database."

Envisioned System

The owners of Setsko, Inc. envision an in-house workflow solution that offers them an easy way to bring up a client's portfolio and view details about individual employees in that client company, but one that provides tight security so that not everyone in the company can see everything. Setsko is entrusted with salary information for each employee it serves (even CEOs of client companies), which is very sensitive information.

As the owners said, they have selected .NET. In fact, because of the widespread availability of Visual Basic programmers in the market, they have stated a preference for Visual Basic .NET as the language. SQL Server has also been chosen as the database server software.

CEO

"You know, as long as we are changing so much, I'm not really fond of our contact management software. The interface is outdated and we are not able to customize it to our needs. It would be nice to integrate a replacement into whatever we build. However, the accounting software has served us well and should expand well even if we grow much larger. We would like whatever solution we come up with to continue to exchange data with that package."

Account Manager

"I have only one account, but it is our largest client. I would really like to be able to pull up all the data for the 500 or so employees in my account, but I sure don't want just anybody doing it. We have great processes in place now. I hope that whatever solution you propose doesn't stir up too much change.

I've also had a request from my account to allow employees access to their individual benefits details from the Internet. I haven't made a proposal to the owner yet, but I'm sure we'll go there some day."

Administrative Staff Member

"I often have to rekey the data multiple times. This is not only frustrating, but has also caused some data entry errors in the past. We're dealing with people's paychecks here, so we can't make mistakes!

One last thingI also do all the roll-up reports manually, with some help from Excel. It sure would be nice to automate that process at some point."