SJV
Tech
SJV Tech
is a business
process consulting
and custom
software
application
development
firm. It
helps its
customers
leverage
technology
in order
to maximize
their business
potential.
One of SJV's customers, Classic Charter, is a charter bus and limousine
company. Classic Charter was in a bind as it was running its business
using a custom VB6 application with an Access database backend. The
company's previous application vendor discontinued support for the
application, but the software still had bugs. Also, the customer desired
multiple feature enhancements and upgrades.
After analysis, SJV Tech recommended that the application data be migrated
to a SQL Server database and a new .NET application be written to replace
the original application. The goals were to build a better foundation
for feature enhancements and to replace the buggy VB6 spaghetti code
with a more robust, object-oriented application.
The primary users of SJV's TripApp application are customer service
representatives. These users spend their day on the phone taking orders
and need a responsive application that is easy to use and has a lot
of information on each screen. The TripApp has customer information
management and order entry modules which facilitate this process. A
customer service rep has quick access to key information and can rapidly
calculate price quotes and enter order information. The application
also contains a daily schedule dashboard for quick at-a-glance views
of which vehicles are in use and for what purpose.
Other modules of the application include:
-
A
city-to-city
distance
calculation
module
-
Driver
pay calculations
and payroll
reporting
-
Customer
call-back
and accounts
receivable
reports
-
Sales
forecasting
and projections
SJV faced many
challenges in
building the
application.
Since the users
were customer
service representatives,
the application
needed to be
extremely responsive
to user interaction.
SJV found the
built-in caching
and querying
features of DevForce
essential, yet
a snap to implement.
Another signficant challenge faced by SJV was that they had inherited
an old and messy data model (ugly names, poor referential integrity,
etc.). Due to budgetary constraints, SJV decided to keep the existing
schema rather than redesigning it. Again, DevForce enabled them to easily
overcome this hurdle by allowing them to map the existing schema to a
semantically clean, object-oriented architecture.
So what was the end result? The project is currently in production and
the users are enjoying the increased productivity and new features that
SJV Tech was able to offer in the redesigned application.
|
