TECHeGO

Business Objective

To build a comprehensive and intelligent app marketplace for companies to build their own ERP systems, while streamlining internal processes for developing proprietary product offerings.

Technical Challenge

Integration of multiple APIs into a modular and centralized public facing platform, while retaining the functionality of disparate API extensions with thousands of pre-existing users across multiple contexts.

The Solution

DreamFactory automated the backend integration with databases and external services, while adding robust security and user management capabilities to the powerful automation tool that TECHeGO developed, AVA (Automated Virtual Assistant).

Streamlined systems for significant savings

TECHeGO is a consultancy firm with over a decade of experience in business operations, systems, and process improvement. With over 300 process-intensive systems in place for a wide variety of clients, they have deep knowledge of process automation and workflow management.

Ranging from Fortune 500 clients to SMBs, the needs of their customers are diverse and challenging. Citrix, Ingram Micro, D&B, Podio, Telus Canada, and even Cirque du Soleil have sought out their expertise.
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“We typically see a return for our clients nearing 30% in year one alone. Connectivity and seamless integration between previously disparate systems gives our clients the clean processes they need to ensure data cleanliness. Clean data leads to educated, smart decision making,” says Executive Vice-president Amanda Campbell.

Developing custom extensions for all their clients was labor intensive and yielded codebase silos that were challenging to integrate laterally. A typical project took 6-8 weeks for extension development and then additional 6 month cycles for beta testing and integration.

Empowerment through backend automation

They found a better way, through automation. Work began on an in-house tool for ERP automation that quickly blossomed into a distinct product itself. But, after 6-8 engineers spending a year developing the tool they faced the prospect of another 10 months of development to yield a finished product.
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That’s when CEO and Enterprise Architect Seth Helgeson discovered DreamFactory.

“We came across DreamFactory in January of 2016 and were ecstatic to learn that it already had a lot of the components we were looking to incorporate and leverage with our products."
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"We were able to skip a 10 month development cycle because DreamFactory had the API endpoints integrated, had the capabilities we were looking for, and had a lot of the security measures necessary to launching our products. We were able to scrap some code we didn’t need, and save a good year on the development cycle to begin implementing solution.

Launching the app marketplace

TECHeGO was able to build out a rich ERP platform, called Hoist, allowing users to quickly and efficiently connect business platforms. Hoist also has an app marketplace, allowing applications to leverage these connections. AVA is one of these applications, which allows users to take advantage of the connections made in their free Hoist instance to design dynamic automations that can trigger data transactions and many other activities from one connected platform to another. All of this made possible by leveraging the Dreamfactory core functionality. The Team has a number of other applications on the drawing board as well which take advantage of the same technology.

“We said this is a perfect time to take DreamFactory and build our own solution and allow us to recreate that ability for us to build automations for our clients and others to do so as well.
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We wanted to give tools to people who wanted to do it themselves and have control over their business processes. Every extension we’ve created is a niche where one platform or another falls short, whether it was for document creation or interconnectivity of data or data integrity or removing data silos,” says Helgeson.

Looking to the future

DreamFactory’s REST API automation platform yielded huge savings in time and resources for TECHeGO by shaving off nearly a year of development. TECHeGO was able to launch a robust cloud hosted developer ecosystem in a manner of months, with a flexible and automated architecture.
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Helgeson’s shares his bottom line, “we’re really focused on bringing about the emergence of the API Economy because APIs are the future of the economy. DreamFactory is the middleware that allows us to expand on our functionality quite significantly.”