General - Case Studies

A Pre Owned Commercial
Vehicle Dealer.

In order to buy second hand commercial vehicle stock for home and export sales, pre printed fliers were sent out weekly on a county by county basis. Addresses came from multiple sources and were in a number of Excel spreadsheets with a high number of duplications and hauliers that had ceased trading. This customer utilises all of our current services, creating both a substantial business growth and savings. By taking on the management of all of their IT and Marketing functions, initially by maintaining their data and website. The data was consolidated into a single database application, “Market” which we had previously developed. Our Market application has enabled us to:-

  • Standardise the format of the address.
  • Remove duplicates.
  • Regionalise addresses.
  • Record the origin of each address with a reference.
  • Research and Interact with the internet and e-mail.
  • Store multiple elements of data against each address.

Although pleased with the general look of the web site we have rewritten it for ease of maintenance as well as adding to it. A bespoke database application has been developed which stores the data off line and then rebuilds the site and posts it to the Internet. Maintenance can be as frequent as 1 - 15 times daily, as it is always changing and kept up to date; it now attracts many more visitors.

We have replaced the pre printed fliers with colour mail merged personalised letters which include photos and a ‘fax back form’ on the reverse. These are printed on a weekly basis and can be changed to reflect changes in the business requirements.

To complete the process we have invested in mail room equipment and pre printed envelopes which bare the business style stamp and a return address to our PO BOX, for any that are undeliverable. The undeliverable letters are recorded in Market which prevents the company being posted to until researched, for either ceasing trading or relocating.

With our extensive combined experience gained in large companies we have been able to offer innovations and solutions that have had a positive effect on the growth of this business.

 



Insurance Company

Due to the company restructuring their South East office was to close with all operations moving to the Head Office in the Midlands. We helped in verifying the migrated data and replicating the reporting which was produced from a new data mart. With such a dramatic change in their data processing and the volume of data it was inevitable that some discrepancies were found. Fortunately they were all accounted for and corrected, although some inaccuracies were found in the old system. The outcome was successful although difficult as the people that I relied upon to help me do the analysis were all to lose their jobs 2 days before Christmas.

A Building Maintenance Contractor.

A typical case for report writing, “the data is in there somewhere”. Reports have been requested and provided for:-

  • Jobs completed but not invoiced.
  • Aged jobs not invoiced.
  • Jobs at different value bands.
  • Jobs by customer.
  • Spend per item with supplier and with price variance per item.

Most reports of this nature that analyse either sales or purchasing should pay for themselves and help to tune your company. In this case jobs were invoiced quicker and suppliers were rationalised, giving lower procurement costs and greater purchasing power with suppliers.

Application and utility solutions.

An application that reads formatted e-mails received from one of their customers and feeds the data directly into an order entry system. This saved a high volume of keying and kept the system up to date. An application to allocate the cost of items booked out from stock to a job. We are in the progress of writing a stock and purchasing system.

A Large Chemical Manufacturer.

After years of using the IBM midrange AS/400, the decision was made to move to a SQL Server based system. Only the open transactions had been migrated to the new system and the AS/00 was to be sold, therefore leaving no access to any history. In this case we migrated their 15 years of accounts and sales data to an access database, with a few simple reports to access the data.
Human Interface Limited