Case Escher is an Employer Services Consultant at The Partners Group (TPG), a financial services company located in the Pacic Northwest. In this interview, he explains how TPG struggled with frontend development and how it limited their capabilities when building solutions for their clients. That all changed when he discovered the m-Power Development Platform. Watch the whole interview to learn how m-Power helped TPG:
Results
Bring web application development in-house
Create new products and solutions for their customers
Extend their existing systems with new capabilities
If I've got one regret when it comes to m-Power, it's that I didn't find it sooner. This is an application I would have loved to have earlier in my career.
Full Text of Video Interview with Case Escher
Introduction
"My name's Case Escher. I'm an employer services consultant here at the Partners Group. The Partners Group, or TPG, is a financial services company here in the Pacific Northwest. We have offices in four states: Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Texas. Primarily, we have two offers to the marketplace: a business to business offer and a business to consumer offer.
My role here essentially can be described as a problem solver. I work with large, complex clients on employee benefits, absence management, and really any complex problem that involves data, financial analysis, and data management consulting and integration problems.
What challenges did you face before m-Power?
Before using m-Power, we were limited on how far we could take innovative new solutions that we would build for our clients or even internally.
Before m-Power, I would meet with a client or a prospect. I'd hear the problem, and immediately my mind would be architecting a back end solution to the problem. I speak fluent SQL and DBMS. What I don't speak is frontend web development. If any anybody's ever been there, you know that in order to bring back end applications to life, you need a front end. You need basically CRUD functionality–create, read, update and delete. Without that, accessing and navigating those back end systems is really limited to those who have those SQL skills.
Before m-Power, when we had to develop CRUD functionality, we were pretty much limited to client tools--things like Access or Excel, which 'work'...but again, they're not scalable and you really can't release those externally very easily.
If we ever encountered an opportunity to create a web application or a solution to solve a client problem or an internal problem, we would have had to go out–not being a tech firm–we would have had to go out, hire web developers or hire a firm to build it for us. That's not an inexpensive proposition. Hiring web developers is not low cost (for good ones), and going out and finding a third party to build what you need also can be quite costly.
And so, anytime we would have new innovative ideas, we were limited in how we could we could deploy those or leverage those on behalf of our clients or prospects or even internally.
What led us to m-Power was just pure frustration. It was frustration over having these ideas, being able to develop these ideas and being limited on what we could, we could do in terms of presenting a front end.
How are you using m-Power?
For what I do here at the Partners Group and the capabilities I can offer to our clients and prospects, it's a game changer.
With m-Power, it's a whole it's a whole new opportunity. It's created capabilities that we didn't have before. It's created paths to innovation that we didn't have before. For what I do here at the Partners Group and the capabilities I can offer to our clients and prospects, it's a game changer.
Extending Salesforce
We're able to take internal processes that were not scalable before and scale them. We're able to bring more visibility to some aspects of our business that we didn't have before. We had a marketing campaign with paid leave Oregon and we used Salesforce. Through Salesforce we were running campaigns and having ad buys. I was able to reach in to that Salesforce data through an API connection, bring it over to m-Power and actually create an application where our marketing people and business leaders could go in, see the leads, and actually notate the leads, make notes, assign them to producers and extend what Salesforce does. Salesforce is a great application, don't get me wrong, but this allowed us to basically extend Salesforce in a way that would have been probably a little hard to do in their development scheme.
Connecting disparate systems
Some other examples where we've used m-Power to extend existing systems: For us being insurance firm on the sales side, every every firm like us has what we call an agency management system, and it houses information like policies and customers. It's part CRM, part financial system, part revenue recognition. These systems are pretty good at what they do, but they're limited in scope of what they do.
For firms like us, we've got data in different systems, we've got customer data in different systems. So, being able to bring that information together, integrate it, and provide a face to it–not just a business intelligence face or a front end. There are some people who see business intelligence as the solution. Business intelligence products like Power BI and Tableau–those are great, right? Those have their place when it comes to discovery and analysis.
But, when you need not just to look at the data and analyze it–you need to actually extend and enhance it. You might need to basically have a user put an attribute on it, or there's actually bits that live outside of those systems that are very, very useful for being able to do analysis and reporting. That's where m-Power has been very, very useful in extending those existing systems. This is functionality that doesn't live natively in those systems and allows us to bring in other aspects and bring them together into brand new applications that are that are not discrete, but they're extensions of existing systems.
Creating new products and services
We've used it both for internal applications and external applications. We've taken existing processes and built whole new front ends and applications to sunset the old legacy and build new ones. We've also invented new products and new services that we've built applications for.
I'll give you some examples: There are a number of states, more than a dozen states across the country that have statutory paid family and medical leave programs. Those programs each have different rules on how much the benefit is and what the waiting period is. Businesses who who have to manage absences for those employees, often have to know what the expected benefit is.
There is no one stop shop calculator out there on the web right now. So if you go to, for example, the state of Colorado. It'll have a calculator that'll help you calculate the expected benefit for Colorado family leave. If you go to Oregon, they have a calculator. Some states don't even have a calculator! So one app I built recently was a paid leave benefit calculator that we provisioned and released to our clients so that they have access. They can pick whatever state they want. They could put the salary, the expected salary of the individual, pick the entitlement that is statutory and see what the estimated benefit is for that employee. That's just one example of an application we built.
What do you like about m-Power?
There are very few instances I've run into with m-Power where I'm hitting a brick wall and the software itself is a limiter. There's very little we can't do with it. Our imagination is the only limiter.
The thing I like most about m-Power is how close it is to the data. It's a web application development tool that is very much cognizant and knowledgeable about back end data structures.
There’s not a lot I don’t like about m-Power! One of the things that is really fantastic about it is it's relatively open. There are very few proprietary aspects to the application. For example, if you've used any other tools–and I'm going to pick on business intelligence tools like Tableau, for example. If you were to use Tableau to do any sort of business intelligence type stuff, you're confined to what they can do, the functions, everything else. You have to live within their ecosystem and you're limited by it. So if you want to do something outside of that, you have to either figure out a way to make it work in Tableau, or you can't do it at all.
You don't run into that with m-Power...from Fusion Charts, which is which is the plugin they that they leverage for for the graphing capabilities, to using JSON for APIs. There are very few instances I've run into with m-Power where I'm hitting a brick wall and the software itself is a limiter. There's very little we can't do with it. Our imagination is the only limiter…and our skill set, of course.
How has m-Power delivered value to TPG?
When I think about the cost of ownership relative to the value we've received, it's fantastic. I mean, the leverage on it is amazing.
When I think about value and m-Power, it really comes down to 'what are we paying for the license fee to use the application itself versus what can we do with it and how can we monetize that?' And again, like I said, it's got unlimited potential for us and we can take it wherever we want it to go.
When I think about the cost of that ownership relative to the value we've received, it's fantastic. I mean, the leverage on it is amazing, right? If anybody is listening to this and you're an economics person or finance person, you understand the notion of scale: If you have a fixed cost and you could sell more units over that fixed cost, your margin goes way up. m-Power has similar leverage for us.
We paid a fixed cost for the software. We pay a modest, you know, not unreasonable annual maintenance fee. And it's up to us to get out of it what we what we think we can get out of it. And that's what we're doing right now. We are building innovative solutions. We're delivering them. We are, in some cases, monetizing them, in other cases as value add to our clients.
But there's there's virtually not a whole lot we can't do in terms of innovative solutions with with the tool.
What is it like working with mrc?
I would say m-Power is a great product by itself. But what makes it fantastic is the service organization. Without them, we wouldn't have been able to get the value we've gotten out of it.
When I think about all the vendors we work with on the vendor side, we've got some strong vendor relationships–don't get me wrong. Most of them are pretty good, in fact, we don't like to tolerate ones that are bad. But of all of the ones that I work with personally, I would say mrc is one of the best, if not the best.
In fact, I would say the service model at mrc is not dissimilar from ours. What I mean by that is when a client reaches out to us with a question, it doesn't go off into some black hole that doesn't get an answer.
I would say m-Power is a great product by itself. But what makes it fantastic is the service organization. Without them, we wouldn't have been able to get the value we've gotten out of it.
What advice would you give others who are considering m-Power?
If I've got one regret when it comes to m-Power, it's that I didn't find it sooner.
If I've got one regret when it comes to m-Power, it's that I didn't find it sooner. This is an application I would have loved to have earlier in my career. I've been at the Partners Group for 13 years. Before that, I was an independent consultant and I would have paid for the application myself as an independent consultant if I'd known it existed and I knew what it could do at the time in terms of solutions, in terms of being able to create front ends, put web apps over data, the way it does it.
To any other business out there, considering m-Power, I would say you won't be disappointed. It delivers as advertised. That's what drew me to it. I saw the claim, I tested and validated the claim, and I proved the claim. We've been happy customer ever since!""
To learn more about The Partners Group, please visit their website: https://www.thepartnersgroup.com/.