Two organisations using two separate Hornbill instances

[Stuart Torres-Catmur]

Dear Hornbill

We have an interesting one for you!

A neighbouring organisation is using Hornbill, accessing their instance via ADFS as we do.

However, they use the services of our procurement team, who have their business processes set up on our instance of Hornbill.

We know that where there is a will there is a way to get them set up to access our instance of Hornbill (e.g. VPN onto an RDS server within our organisation), but wondered if there is a straightforward way for them to access our instance and their own instance without much fuss (e.g. using our Customer Portal)

[Steven Boardman]

Hi @Stuart Torres-Catmur good question and hopefully there is a possible solution for you. Are you familiar with the Hornbill iBridge?

Wiki info if not: https://wiki.hornbill.com/index.php/Hornbill_iBridge

With the iBridge enabled and configured into business processes on their instance and through their self service they could offer your procurement service.  If a request was raised on their instance, the underpinning business process could automatically via the iBridge log a request on your instance for your procurement team to manage.  In the business process your procurement team are using, they could in turn use the iBridge options to update and also resolve / close the originating request sat on their instance.

Below is an example of the Hornbill iBridge options which are already there. 

The benefit of this approach could be that both organisations remain on their own instances, and the end users of the other organisation only have to deal with their own self service, rather than perhaps having to go to your customer portal to raise those types of requests. 

There are some considerations to this approach not least the user data challenge across the two instances:

* The requestors on the other organisations instance will not be known on yours, in regards to the 'customer' for the procurement requests on your instance - but potentially the critical info like, name, contact info could be passed across at the point of the request being raised on your instance via the iBridge

This of course is just a suggestion and there may well be other approaches to consider, and maybe this is one to discuss with our customer success team, so they can go through options and approaches with you?

But hopefully this gives you some food for thought?

Steve

 

[Stuart Torres-Catmur]

Hi @Steven Boardman

Thanks, this is exactly the kind of answer I was hoping for.  Whether our two organisations can put in the time (and money) to set up this solution remains to be seen.  I've certainly done my best to pitch it to them as a significant service improvement/efficiency saving.

All the best

Stuart

[Steven Boardman]

@Stuart Torres-Catmur no problem, do let us know if we can help with supporting the case or providing insight into the technicalities of the approach.