AMO Eyecare is a global leader in the provision of contact lens solutions.
Summary
AMO Eyecare UK wanted to put their customer data into a single application that could be used throughout the organizationPreviously individual sectors held and managed their own contact data.
The objective of this project was to create a single application that could be updated and shared by all of these users regardless of whether they were working within the AMO firewall or traveling with laptop computers.
The end product is a very powerful tool that contains all the data already gathered, which is a key resource for the company and which has a broad functionality that meets the functional requirements of all the different user groups.
What AMO says:
'I wanted to say a huge thank you for all your work and efforts to make it possible to get the database launched to our key users yesterday. We had a really good session yesterday afternoon with our sales team - We were able to easily search the database, input a variety of amendments and also synchronise data with your server. Everyone was really positive and could see the future benefit and potential of the system. I realise the timescales have been incredibly tight so far and that you have been working in an ongoing design/testing/upgrade mode, and I cannot emphasis enough to our management team how quickly you respond to changes etc.'
The programme of work involved a series of steps:
• Detailed discussions with the AMO Eyecare team to define the database structure and scope. The result being far more than a simple set of contacts and addresses as first envisaged
• Clearly categorise customer contact data, provide flexibility to manage multiple customer contacts, develop marketing information and a customer communication history. Future developments include automated mail merge functionality and linking data forms to individual calendars in Outlook to enable users to create their own bring forward reminders
• Import all the data from various sources – spreadsheets and Outlook contact files, into the database.
• Work with AMO network managers to enable secure access to our SQL server from within their firewall.
• Create an SQL replication system and a deployment package.
• To run the replication system it was necessary to install the Microsoft MSDE service on all computers. A company conference was an ideal (if a little early) opportunity to get it working.
• We also took that opportunity to introduce the application to all the users with a half day training session
Added extras:
During the training we invited feedback from all the users and they came back with a variety of ‘nice to have’ option requests. Eg showing customers that are linked together in groups, being able to select by Post Code, being able to search by any other criteria.
Our solution was to develop a highly flexible set of ‘filters’ which put all of this information, in any format desirable, at the fingertips of the user. Just to add a bit of icing on the cake, any of these filtered lists could then be exported either to a report or to an Excel spreadsheet.
Conclusion
This has been a highly successful project in which substantially more has been delivered that was originally requested and which provides a strong basis for future development of the business objectives of the company.
Delivered above specification, on time, and on budget.