This client is in the Business to Business service industry.
They supply key items to businesses and keep track of multiple warehouses of inventory as well as on-site service agents.
Before our project they used multiple spreadsheets to keep track of on-site services and the inventory used so they could manage each customer's account.
This company billed customers monthly and had a history of making mistakes, so they had put in place extensive review processes to make sure their spreadsheets were up to date before they billed. These meetings would last more than a full day and involve verifying thousands of data points from mountains of faxes. Their forecasting and performance metrics were very rudimentary because they had no confidence in the data.
It was very easy to turn the spreadsheets into a small database. The steps a typical account would go through were turned into a tabbed interface on a single screen. This allowed the data entry to go very quickly and provided the account status in an explicit and unmistakable way, eliminating mistakes. Many data entry checks were put into place to assure that there were no errors. Within three months confidence was restored and the monthly review meetings were down to one hour.
A full dashboard was implemented so that everyone in the company knew exactly how the company was doing for the day, month and year, as well as how each individual employee was doing for the day, month and year.
Total hours: 45
An officer of the company stated that the application had paid for itself the first full month of use.