Sector: Consumer Goods
Industry: Home Furnishings and Fixtures
Revenue: $8 million
The furniture manufacturer strives to manufacture stylish, affordable, quality furniture for homes. Many of their products are innovative and unique, offering their customers furniture that is in style with the times.
Business Situation
The company developed their own in house electronic systems to manage their everyday operations. As industry logistics became more electronic over time, they moved with the trends and further developed their systems. Over the years the systems had grown into several different applications. Their systems infrastructure became complex and started to crash because of the large amounts of data they had accumulated. The company required professional assistance to reorganize their existing systems and migrate to a more stable platform.
The company also had plans to develop a website that would allow their customers to view their order information online. It was important that the customized solution be able to integrate with the future website.
The business process continuously changes and the company needs to be able to update their systems to adapt to those changes. In addition, a few of the company’s staff required training on making programming updates to the new system.
Solution
Operations Management System
Before building the system, the Access Programmers team performed an extensive requirements phase to discover and document the company’s existing systems. This enabled Access Programmers to identify all the requirements and functionality needed for the new system.
The client needed a system that they could update in house. A Microsoft Access Data Project (ADP) was identified as the most suitable platform to use since they were already familiar with Access. An ADP uses Microsoft Access to run the screens and reports and the powerful SQL Server database to house and process the data.
After documenting their existing systems, Access Programmers began developing the Operations Management System to consolidate several existing systems into one. All the existing forms, reports, data tables, queries, and code were converted and implemented into the new system.
Hands On Technical Training
Access Programmers provided the company’s staff with several on site training sessions. The training sessions provided hands on training of the technical skills necessary to make updates to the Access Data Project. This enabled the staff to adapt their system to business changes without the added cost of outside assistance. This helped make the company more agile and continuously saves the company money since they do not need outside consulting assistance.
System Implementation
In order to provide the company with a seamless integration, the existing data needed to migrate to the new system. A SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) package was developed to easily and quickly migrate the data from the existing systems to the new consolidated system. This enabled the company to have all of the data from their previous systems moved into their new system. Using the SSIS package made implementing the new system easy and painless.
Future Development Taken Into Consideration
The company’s goal in the future is to build a website to enable their customers to view the status of their orders online. The new Operations Management System uses SQL Server 2005 as the database platform, which is also used as a database platform for websites. This will enable the company to more cost effectively develop this website in addition to keeping the website fully integrated with their operations.