Call Flow Charting System

MCI

The Problem

Process engineers at MCI design the internal routing that each type of call through their systems must follow—and there are hundreds of scenarios. In order to refer to and use these callflow designs, engineers, and analysts had to sort through voluminous paper-based flowcharts (produced using Microsoft Visio) and supporting documents. Identifying a specific callflow process involved cross-referencing data manually across several documents, some of them hundreds of pages in length.

The Solution

MCI knew intuitively that a web-based approach for accessing this material made sense; however, there was no off-the-shelf tool that would do the job. Developers at GMRI's Services Division, now Fulcrum IT, built a system that automatically publishes MCI's call-flow diagrams from Visio into a dynamic website. Fulcrum IT developed an application that reads Microsoft Visio constructs and makes them web-accessible.

The Results

MCI engineers now literally navigate through more than 300 flow charts, each chart linked to the next and to supporting documentation. When a user clicks a connector shape on one diagram, the diagram to which it leads or a set of detailed instructions associated with it is loaded into the browser.

The information is fully searchable based on application-specific metadata and is stored in a SQL Server database. A direct look-up capability enables users to display the meanings of a variety of system codes with which many shapes on the flowcharts are labeled.

Web-enabling the medium in which the engineers work has enormously increased their productivity, allowing them to provide greater value to the organization.