Business Situation
When France's new regulatory framework for public spending was enacted in January 2006, which included the LOLF law (Loi organique relative aux lois de finances), all public bodies had to reconsider their methods for tracking and reporting expenditures. These new obligations spurred the French Defense Ministry's human resources division to embark on an ambitious project in order to track resources and plan budgets for individual programs and projects.

Solution
The SGA, a state body in charge of the French Defense Ministry’s administrative management, selected Accenture and Avanade as their integration partners, wanting to ensure both technical and change management aspects of the project would be equally considered. At the heart of EDRH is Microsoft's Business Intelligence Solutions, built on Microsoft SQL 2005.

This central part of the system is responsible for managing data, extracting the requested information and producing the corresponding reports. EDRH was made easily accessible through an enterprise portal based on Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007. All access is managed through the portal. On the client side, users access EDRH through their web browser. They also use Pro Clarity for database queries and Excel for further data analysis

Results
Today, more than 200 users have access to the system and are expressing a high level of satisfaction. EDRH has lifted many roadblocks in the data gathering process. Until recently, users were spending 70% of their time acquiring information and only 30% actually exploiting it. Today EDRH has inverted this ratio.

Also, by accelerating the data gathering process from diversified sources across the armed forces, EDRH has dramatically sped up the generation of HR reports. Some reports that needed several months of collation work are now produced in less than two weeks.