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What’s New on the Beeline Technology Horizon: BeelineOne

04/18/2018 By

Beeline Senior Vice President of Strategy Colleen Tiner made two important product announcements at the 2018 Beeline Conference Tuesday, providing a clearer technology roadmap for the company following its merger with IQNavigator.

The first announcement concerned the completion of Horizon, Beeline’s name for its new underlying microservices platform. The second covered the development of BeelineOne, a user-facing product that delivers a common set of capabilities from both Beeline and IQN’s platforms.

To learn more about Horizon and BeelineOne, we spoke with the Beeline engineering team to understand what is complete, what is available and what is in the works.

Horizon

Last year, Beeline began developing a new platform to support a single set of functionalities for both Beeline and IQN users. This platform is the foundation of Beeline’s broader integration strategy to converge the two original VMS platforms rather than eliminate either one or the other.

To accomplish this, however, Beeline needed to establish an entirely new technology, one that could not only support the best functionality from the original VMS platforms, but also support future capabilities and workforce solutions. That’s where Horizon comes in.

In fact, Horizon already supports five different capabilities that Beeline and IQN users  could previously only find in their own legacy VMS platform.  These are:  Self-Sourcing; rate, time and expense engines; supplier scorecards; SmartView; and mobile capabilities.

During our discussion with the engineering team, Beeline demoed a single authentication sign-on for both Beeline and IQN users, as well as a fine-grained configuration capability for user roles and permissions. These features are extremely useful not only for client organizations but also for MSPs and suppliers.

For example, MSPs may serve a number of different clients today that use either Beeline or IQN. Horizon allows MSPs to configure access to different clients on either platform. In addition, MSPs can configure different roles and permissions that would allow certain MSP staff to access and service only the clients assigned to them. MSPs can also configure roles and permissions to give a management-level user a bird’s-eye view across all clients on both VMS platforms.

BeelineOne

While just the start of Beeline’s convergence process at a user-focused functionality level, completing the Horizon platform in just over a year’s time is a significant achievement.

Enter BeelineOne.

To understand what BeelineOne is, consider this analogy. If Horizon is the foundation of a house, along with framing, plumbing, electrical system, then BeelineOne is the rest of the structure, where residents will experience and use the functionalities of the house (e.g., kitchen, bathroom, bedroom). In effect, BeelineOne is the common set of capabilities and solutions that clients, MSPs and suppliers will be able to use and get value from.

With the completion of Horizon, Beeline is now focusing on the development of BeelineOne. At the moment, Beeline has a working prototype of a set of capabilities that are prioritized in the roadmap and which should begin to appear over the course of this year.

During a demo, we saw core functionality for clients, MSPs and suppliers. Client end users have access to core capabilities arranged in a single browser window (with excellent UX properties). These capabilities included a widget-based dashboard, requisitioning, activities view and notifications — in effect, the core functionality needed to source and track contingent workers.

A key capability — no doubt the most powerful — was what Beeline called “search without borders.” This allows an end user, for example, to search for and obtain information about a particular worker, including not only basic data but also a broader set of related information connected to that worker (e.g., where the worker has been deployed before, evaluation feedback, the source supplier).

These capabilities will be released over the course of this year. But that is just the beginning of BeelineOne, which Beeline will continue to develop with new integrated capabilities and solutions after the point of convergence: when clients, MSPs and suppliers have ceased to use the functionality of their legacy VMS solutions.

Conclusion

Completing Horizon and developing BeelineOne marks a significant milestone for Beeline. The company has made excellent progress on its convergence strategy, even as it has wrestled with numerous business integration challenges.

Convergence, however, is not just about migrating functionality from the two legacy VMS solutions to the new Horizon platform in the form of BeelineOne. Ultimately, it is about developing new future capabilities and solutions on the Horizon platform, integrating and unifying them under BeelineOne’s user-oriented solution umbrella.

Beeline has made impressive progress by completing the foundation with Horizon, but it is not out of the woods yet. Executing on Horizon means there is still a long and challenging road ahead.

Stand by for more conference coverage as the 2018 Beeline Conference continues.

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