Case Study - SWAT
Background
SWAT Ltd is a leading provider of accountancy related services, including provision of training, consultancy and publications to the accountancy market. They have several offices throughout the UK and provide services to their customers via membership subscriptions and on an adhoc basis, each year they run several hundred courses at various venues throughout the UK.
SWAT previously used a number of legacy software applications to manage the various facets of their business, including: course bookings, customer contact, sales, marketing, website content, employee expenses, invoicing and job costing. SWAT realised that their current fragmented IT infrastructure needed centralising, and as part of that process their software and database architecture needed to be completely overhauled.
SWAT was already dealing with one of our partner firms, Albert Goodman Ltd, for provision of their IT support, and Elemental Logic was brought in at an early stage to start discussing their software requirements and work alongside Albert Goodman in the new infrastructure design and roll-out.
The Solution
It was immediately obvious that SWAT needed to centralise their data, and integrate their current systems to improve the information flow and management throughout the company. Any "off-the-shelf" package was not going to meet SWAT's very specific requirements without a large amount of customisation work, and a far more flexible alternative in this instance is a fully bespoke database application. Because of SWAT's numerous sites and mobile employees any solution would have to be accessible from a number of locations and via different devices, on that basis it was decided that the new application should be a web application running within SWATs network, and that remote sites and users would connect via secure VPN connections. Creating the application in this manner also means that there is no software on each client computer so support issues are kept to a minimum, and roll-out is simple.
The final application was produced using ASP.NET and SQL Server, and is hosted at SWAT's head office, it was developed using n-tier architecture, so will provide an open platform for future expansion and developement. It addresses every facet of SWAT's business model, including:
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
- Membership Administration
- Course Booking & Administration
- Staff Diary Management
- Product Catalogue
- Ordering
- Invoicing
- Services Management
- Project/Job costing
- Staff Expenses
- Sales Leads & Marketing Campaigns
- Tasks, Activities & Attachments
- Reporting
Elemental Logic worked closely with both SWAT and Albert Goodman, who were rolling out the hardware infrastructure, over a period of several months as the system was developed, tested and refined.
The system was completed and a final version released in April 2007 after a 12 month development cycle. Elemental Logic will continue to provide support and maintenance and having already completed a number of revisions and changes we look forward to a longterm ongoing relationship with SWAT in future.
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