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Consulting Services Company
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"Swip Systems significantly reduced the amount of time that it takes for us to manage, collect time on and invoice our projects."
Satisfied CEO
History
Established in 1996, this company provides professional consulting services to
various types of businesses. Their focus is to improve businesses through
re-engineering their processes. This fast growing company has doubled its size
over the past several years and continues to be in high demand.
Challenge
The company utilized Microsoft® Excel® spreadsheets
to track and maintain the hours that their consultants worked on specific projects. This
method conveniently allowed the consultants to take the spreadsheets with them
on their jobs. As the company grew, however, compiling the spreadsheets at the end of the
week became a time consuming, tedious task. In addition,
invoices had to be manually generated, leaving room for error, repetition of data and
a bottleneck in the process. The company wanted to implement a solution that would
streamline the process while increasing productivity and accuracy.
Solution
Engineers from Swip Systems met with the managers in charge of the project to discuss
the challenges that they were encountering with their current system. The goal of the
meeting was to establish a strategy that would eliminate the problems caused by the
current procedures and simplify the overall process.
Our software engineers began
working with the project managers to learn the processes in place and to determine
ways in which the process could be automated. Our engineers utilized our
customizable modules
to architect a new software application that would allow for: managers to create project lists,
consultants to report their time to the corresponding project and the accounting
department to compile the projects and associated hours into invoices.
Once the initial structure of the application was designed, our software engineers
worked with the project managers to develop
mobile software, for the
Palm® family of
handheld devices, to replace
the Microsoft® Excel® spreadsheets. Doing this allowed the company's mobile workforce
to record their time at the job site and electronically submit their time when they
returned to the office.
Also during this time, our software engineers worked with the accounting department
to automate the process of compiling invoices from submitted hours. We further
simplified the process by
integrating
the new software directly into the accounts receivable functionality of their existing
accounting system.
While the software was being developed, our network engineers assisted the company in
architecting a local area
network that would suit their current and future needs. Our engineers helped the
company select and implement the optimum mix of
servers,
networking devices,
security devices,
client PCs and
printers
necessary to interconnect the people in the organization.
Once the network infrastructure was in place, our engineers locked down
network security to prevent malicious
attacks and protect the company's investment. We also assisted with
disaster planning
and recovery,
disk imaging and
secondary hardware
services to protect the company's data and keep their systems up and running.
As a second phase to the project, the company elected to utilize our full suite
of customizable modules
to build a comprehensive application to run every aspect of their business.
The company continues to work with Swip Systems through utilization of our
network administration
and monthly checkup services.
In addition, Swip Systems continues to modify the software application and network
infrastructure as the company's needs continue to change and grow.
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