Problem: The contact center at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) was servicing a record volume of potential immigrants at a high cost per contact. At the same time, the self-service USCIS Web portal reached its capacity.

Solution: Merlin International® designed and built a new process-oriented USCIS portal that is user friendly and aligned with the immigration process to include all of the required steps and forms. Merlin also engineered a higher capacity, fault-tolerant platform for the portal.

Results: The new portal became the reference standard for the U.S. immigration process. USCIS contact center calls, and thus costs, dramatically decreased due to user effectiveness with the portal.

Problem: Business transactions at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) cut across systems, but its information-technology systems are of the stovepipe variety – purpose-built over time on a range of technologies. As a result, end-to-end control was not possible.

Solution: Merlin International® delivered an integration bus to provide common interfaces and messaging to the disparate IT systems and then orchestrated transactions that fluidly span them.

Results: NIH now has insight and control over its important transactions, not just its systems. NIH has realized cost savings through the efficiencies of direct system-to-system integration versus human data entry.

Problem: Business process management-enabled procurement processes at the U.S. Department of Defense’s Missile Defense Agency (MDA) were performing slower than desired.

Solution: Merlin International® applied its expertise to execute a tuning analysis of the MDA business process management (BPM) environment to include the process models, a BPM server, storage servers and a hosting platform.

Results: Prioritized optimization recommendations were delivered on all aspects of the MDA BPM environment to bring performance back in line with user expectations.

Problem: Keeping user identities up-to-date and consistent across the many identity-management systems at the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) is difficult since changes may be made to any one of them at any given time.

Solution: Merlin International® implemented a business process management-enabled process to detect changes made to any one of DISA’s ID-management systems and to apply those changes to others in a standard manner.

Results: Automating the synchronization process has improved productivity for both users, who receive uninterrupted access to applications, and administrators, who no longer need to troubleshoot data inconsistencies.