EBP Horizon shortens management processes with Microsoft

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The French software publisher is transforming practices with its EBP Horizon web platform that businesspeople can use to control their activity. The goal is to support them on a daily basis and to offer a real-time 360° vision of their business. EBP Horizon is hosted on Microsoft Azure in order to continually benefit from innovative services.

As digital technology advances, every activity in the company is being upended, as its various departments, and the accounting department in particular, gather newfound impetus to contribute to the company's growth.

For EBP, the idea was to offer a web-based management solution for businesses of 1 to 10 people that can oversee a range of services including quotes, invoices, accounting, and CRM.

A simple solution, right from the start

The complexity of the software currently available on the market can pose a problem for today's businesspeople. But its ease of use, ergonomics and user-friendliness make EBP Horizon different. This solution is designed specifically to be accessible to everyone, including the non-IT specialists who make up the majority of users in organizations.

For EBP Horizon, the goal was to simplify business people's everyday work and to help them save time in accounting and business management tasks. EBP Horizon offers them immediate visibility of their business activity. And the solution also offers a connected experience that centralizes all the data in a single interface. A partnership with Microsoft seemed to be obvious, mainly thanks to its Azure services, plus the third-party applications and related products that cover most of the needs and business scenarios that companies face.

"With EBP Horizon, we wanted to offer a new business-oriented working experience rather than a solution focused on just one aspect, such as accounting, for example. We took a close look at our customers' practices in order to produce a 360° platform," explains EBP's Technical Director, Pierre Aubin. "And, thanks to Microsoft, we benefited from the agility of cloud computing and reduced our infrastructure constraints."

EBP also wanted to offer an optimal user experience by providing a chatbot for users that makes it easier to get started with the software. EBP developed its chatbot, called Hector, using the LUIS speech-recognition service and the Azure Bot Service that is available on the Azure portal. Microsoft Cognitive Services and the Azure Bot Service are enriching the next generation of chatbots with algorithms that see, hear, state, understand, and interpret users' needs using natural communication methods.

EBP Horizon was developed to meet the needs of the business processes in the different links of the company chain. The graphic charter and the logic behind the platform help make it more intuitive. It is simple to get started with EBP Horizon, which can easily be deployed across the entire organization.

A user-friendly solution designed for businesspeople

"We wanted to build a product adapted to the person who logs on, and to offer the most suitable and relevant ergonomics and usage," states EBP's Technical Director.

As a consequence, EBP Horizon is well suited to the needs of company directors. For example, the solution offers two modes of access: one for the company director and one for the chief accountant. Company directors can control routine operations, such as customer invoicing and the clearing of payments, the choice of the means of payment, cash-flow management, and sales admin (quotes, invoices), while the chief accountant has permission to make changes to entries and to use more complex programs.

Users simply have to enter their login to gain access to all their dedicated functionality. They can save and update data and share information with the company director, their manager, or the chief accountant. But the businessperson can also access the details of the accounts and book entries, too, if necessary. Microsoft technology adapts the way the software works to the user's profile. Microsoft technologies address the issue of the automation of accounting tasks, so that businesspeople can concentrate on tasks with more added value.

"The data is processed automatically, offering pre-allocation options in the accounts to users. That means fewer clicks and more time-savings for businesspeople. And our artificial intelligence allows us to offer ad-hoc company support in the form of Hector, our chatbot," continues Pierre Aubin. The ultimate goal is that users learn how to make optimal use of the tool themselves.

Toward more agile management and the transformation of Enable Azure

Microsoft Azure has enabled EBP to significantly speed up its development operations by reducing infrastructure-related constraints. "This flexibility has really changed the way we work. We now have an infinite number of possible tests, and we have considerably cut the length of our production cycles. We have ramped up from two versions of EBP Horizon a year to two per month!" explains Pierre Aubin.

The Azure technologies call on a complete set of development tools and tests that enable the teams at EBP to collaborate and finish their projects at the speed of the Cloud, while also designing new features. It is now possible to quickly produce development and test environments that are consistent with specific conditions, thanks to an infrastructure that can be scaled up or down on demand.

"The way we work has become more agile, and Microsoft has enabled us to speed up the transformation of our Enable Azure and to have a cross-functional vision of users' needs, at a speed of execution that we could not reach previously," states EBP's Technical Director.

As a result, the development of this new-generation management platform now incorporates new business management practices such as co-working; and since it is easier to administer, the time to market has been shortened, too.