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American Poolplayers Association
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"Swip Systems restored our faith in customized software development solutions."
Renee Dyer - Information Systems Manager - Software
Don't take our word for it, ask her yourself:
Contact Renee at (636)625-8611 ext. 5448 or rdyer@poolplayers.com
Visit APA's web site at www.poolplayers.com.
History
The American Poolplayers Association (APA) was founded by 2 professional pool players
in 1979 as the National Pool League. In 1981, it became the American Poolplayers
Association. Today, the APA has grown to more than 200,000 members and boasts more
members than all other national leagues combined. From 1999 to the present, Entrepreneur
Magazine® rated the APA 1st in the category of Sports-Event Planning. Entrepreneur
Magazine® also honored the APA with a No. 53 ranking out of 500 franchising companies
in 1998.
Challenge
The APA had been working for several years with a large, well known
regional solution provider to convert their existing software application
to a newer, more robust software development platform. The original software
application was designed to manage the franchise, league and membership portions
of the APA's business process. Due to a significant amount of consultant turnover and
poor project management, the software application was very much over budget,
overdue and full of bugs. More importantly, the APA was very dissatisfied
with the lack of progress and questioned whether the solution provider
possessed the ability to finish the project.
Solution
In an effort to get the APA project back on track, members of the Swip Systems
software development
team met with Renee Dyer and Elaine Rose, the two managers
in charge of the project at APA. The goal was to determine if the project could
be salvaged or if the project had to be scrapped and restarted from the beginning.
After a thorough review period, it was determined that the project could
in fact be salvaged. However, a large amount of software code standardization
and reorganization was first required to get the project to a workable status.
Our software developers began this task immediately to pave the way for the
next steps in the development cycle.
While the software code was being standardized and reorganized, our software
engineers began implementing our
customizable modules
into the application. Our unique, rapid approach to
customized
software development allowed us to quickly make up for lost time and get the
software functioning within a very short period.
Once the project was back on track, a thorough bug tracking period was
started to target a forty-eight page report that the APA had compiled on
known bugs. A strategy was initiated by our software development team to
eliminate every bug documented in the report and test the corrected software
with Renee to make sure the desired functionality was achieved.
During the bug elimination period, our software engineers began reconstructing
the field management
integration
functionality within the software application. The
integration
functionality collected data from the field system utilized by league operators
in over 200 locations across USA and Canada. The functionality also updated
all 200 locations with information from the central APA office.
Along with the software development at APA, our network engineers worked with
Renee and Elaine to select
networking components,
security devices,
servers and
client PCs
designed to fit the specific infrastructure needs of the APA
local area network.
In addition to the infrastructure, our engineers assisted with
network security and
disaster
planning and recovery strategies to protect APA's investment. Our
network
administrators also joined in to help with day-to-day problems, upgrades
and questions that arose during the project.
Seven months after taking over the project, the re-engineered software
application was fully tested and operational at APA. From this point, a
phased approach was utilized to implement the remaining components of the
software application.
This solution provided APA with an answer to their customized software
development challenges along with the ability to modify and expand the system
as their organization changes and grows. APA continues to work with Swip
Systems to establish new functionality and expand the software application to
meet the current and future growth of their organization.
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