The Challenge

To be part of the Syrian “e-government”, the Ministry of Expatriates sought after investing in its infrastructure by planning to implement a powerful Content Management System that is capable of handling and automatically processing the day-to-day significantly increasing amounts of requested services submitted by the expatriates, while providing new set of communication tools that would help the Ministry to provide a better service in less time.

The system must work on structuring the internal processes to provide employees with a more centralized and efficient knowledge-sharing environment, and automate the Ministry’s internal and external correspondence system to reach the goal of becoming a paperless work environment. The system must as well, provide a fast access to the stored data with flexible searching tools in order to speedup the process of service providing and ensure a higher level of customer service support.

The Solution

Referring to the successful record of system implementations within the governmental sector in the Middle East, and for the properly prepared and presented Pilot by ASSET Team, the Syrian Ministry of Expatriates decided to choose ASSET to take charge of this challenging project.

As soon as the agreement was made, ASSET team started to carefully analyze the submitted customer needs and came up with a well studied plan for the system implementation in the Ministry.

The solution was expected to facelift the Ministry’s website and converts it into an integrated Portal that presents a wide set of e-service to the Syrian Expatriates like: Visit requests to enter Syria, Leave Facilitation Request, Residence Extension Request, Investment Problem, Investment Case in Syria, General Inquiries…
All while providing some easy-to-use tools for Portal Contents updates that are suitable for users with varying levels of computer knowledge.

The internal processes had to be automated and linked to the online services so whenever a service request is submitted, it automatically start its cycle within the Ministry’s different departments, all in addition to a full automation of the internal and external correspondence system used by all the Ministry’s departments.

After a careful study of the Ministry’s structure, activities, website, used applications and set of requirements, ASSET recommended a solution based on Jupiter Enterprise Suite including:

• Business Process Automation of major work activities by providing guided procedures that ensure a smooth collaboration between all the departments involved in the process of issuing, reviewing and finally approving a requested service or document
• Documents & Records Management for handling the capturing, organizing and retrieving of all the Ministry’s documents as well as planning for each document’s lifecycle within the system
• Website Content Management that integrates with Jupiter’s document management and workflow automation solutions to utilize the information stored into Jupiter repository using a simple GUI for non-technical users in order to manage the portal’s content authoring, review and publishing processes
• Portal Integration with Oracle Portal using Jupiter’s Portal Integration Kit, to help Ministry deliver an e-Services Portal and automate the internal requests initiated from within the portal
• Full Text Retrieval that locates the documents, not simply by their keywords, but by the text that is contained in them and generate reports to support the decision making
• Office Integration helping users to be more productive by storing and retrieving documents directly from within MS Office interface

The solution offered a smart way to create a single point of contact between all the Ministry’s departments. Full automation of both the internal and the external correspondences was successful implementation in the following departments:

• Front Office
• Information and Culture Department
• Information Technology Department
• Public Relations Department
• Managerial and Legal Department
• Financial Department
• Minister’s Office

The Results

During the project implementation, ASSET team was working on two main phases in parallel and the system was developed and fully functional in a nine month time.

The first phase:
was making a major facelift to the Ministry’s website and convert it into a Portal that integrates smoothly with Jupiter Content Management System.

The second phase:
was to automate the internal processes and link the sent requests, (whether they are submitted manually by the system users or automatically through the online forms), to Jupiter System.

The delivered solution was considered to be the most efficient communication tool that was ever used by the Ministry to communicate with the Syrian expatriates allover the world. The Portal helped in keeping the Syrian expatriates updated with the latest happenings within Syria, as well as providing them with the wide set of online services, while making its way much easier for the Ministry’s employees to handle the enormous amount of requests faster than ever.

Jupiter implementation in the Syrian Ministry of Expatriates resulted in:

• Automating the workflow and internal correspondence within the Ministry’s different departments
• Receiving services requests from individual expatriates through the online forms available on the Ministry’s new portal
• Faster response to the submitted services requests by expatriates with the support of a powerful follow-up system
• Creating a unified database of the Syrian Expatriates by using the online registration forms that was added to the Ministry’s new Portal
• Easy-to-Use documents retrieval and archiving system
• Availing a user-friendly way to update the Portal contents without the need for technical assistance
• Reducing the operational costs by using digital documents for the internal correspondence
• Strict security measures for internal documents transmission to ensure confidentiality of the Ministry’s data