Client Portfolio

Chubb Fire Ltd
Andrew took over the development and support of an Access database, which diarises and records the results of visits by Fire Safety Officers to commercial properties around the country to carry oout weekly fire alarm tests, emergency light tests and fire alarm drills in 2001. The previous developers were reaching the edge of their design envelope and were no longer able to create the features and functions the client required.

Andrew has successfully managed this database ever since.

Andrew has also produced two database driven websites for Chubb, the mark 1 and mark 2 versions of a system to record the findings of Fire Risk Assessments carried out by their fire officers and to produce the finished report for the customer.

Further, the findings are visible to the client through the website for all of their buildings and it allows them to sign of their non conformances and re-run the report to reflect these changes.

The big advantage of this system is the ability to manage the non conformances for large numbers of buildings through the Management Analysis console, and to create automated reminder emails to those responsible for non conformance rectification and to notify their clients when new reports become available.

There are many great features in this website such as the on-the-fly .pdf report generation, and positioning of non conformance locations on Cad plans, which is actually done my interrupting the rendering process of the CAD plan image and displaying colour co-ordinated spots for those locations requested through the database by the user. It does not use layers and is not restricted to either showing all locations or none at all!

Carrier Refrigeration
Andrew has developed three Access databases for Carrier since 2001. The first was a system to allow the recording of snags when inspecting supermarket refrigeration installations. This included the ability to take digital photographs and display these in the final report created by the database. It’s worth pointing out here that (until the introduction of Access 2007) storing images in a database was massively problematical due to the expansion in size such images have when saved directly in the database. To overcome this, the images were stored in a separate folder, and called into the report ‘on the fly’ when the report was displayed or printed.

The second database was a Configurator database which allowed their salesmen to create a complete supermarket of cabinets, building them up from the basic chassis, and including all of the options required by the client, and produced not only the quotation for the client, but the purchase orders for the German cabinet factory and order requests for all of the UK sourced items, ready for processing.

The third database analyses sales performance both in the past and in the future by allowing users to log enquires as they arise, record the quoted price, costs and margin and track the progress of the enquiry through to an order and completion. Using the information created for each project, analysis by customer or by time period can be carried out, and this can be compared against the budgets for each period which are also entered into the database.

Naturally all of these databases create a large range of paperwork required for each stage of the processes.

Aston University
Andrew was asked to produce an Access version of the Chubb Global website. This was done with the blessing of Chubb and carries out all of the functionality of the Chubb Global website expect dealing with CAD plans and non conformance locations as this was not required by Aston University.

Risingbrook Car and Van Hire
This is one of Andrew’s oldest databases that is still in use, having first been installed in 1999. It is linked to their Sage Line 50 accounts package using Sage Data Objects (SDO) to allow real time communication in both directions between the database and Sage.

The database primarily deals with the diary aspect of the vehicle fleet, allowing staff to quickly see which vehicles of a given type are available for the dates required by the client. It will also provide them with the standard charges for that period of hire and will process the booking gathering the hirer and driver details, etc.

If the hirer is an account customer, then the hire details are passed to Sage and Sage creates a suspended invoice, and passes the invoice number back to the database to confirm that the loop is complete. The invoices can then be processed by Sage merely by posting the invoices.

Tara Roadair
Tara bought a proprietory database developed for the transport industry. However this company went into liquidation in 2009, leaving Tara with no support on the piece of software they relied on to run their business. Fortunately they were able to buy the source code.

Since then Andrew has created an electronic invoicing system. This is a completely seamless set or procedures, which allows Tara to carry out their weekly invoicing at the touch of a button.

The software creates the invoice, outputs it as a .pdf document, and saves this to a specific folder on their server, using the invoice number as the file name. It then creates an email, addressed to the accounts payable department contact for the customer, and includes the invoice number in the email title, and a standard body of text in the email. It then attaches the .pdf invoice and sends it. It then goes onto the next customer and does the same for them. All of this without human intervention!

Utopia
This was a start up business (a hairdressers) who needed a database to deal with their stock ordering and usage and manage invoicing of their clients and payment tracking. It was developed as an ongoing project, allowing the salon owners to set minimum and maximum stock levels for each product, create auto ordering lists based on this and average usage, update stock information when orders were received and create service and product invoices for clients.

The main benefits of this database was in the reporting functions. The owners were able to do analysis on an individual client, from how often they used the salon, average spend start and end dates of patronage, alerts when they hadn’t been in for an unusually long time, automatic letter generation for promotional tasks.

They were also able to see how many clients had been serviced per day / week / month as a whole or by stylist, average turnover per invoice and average profit etc. And analyse trends by month and year.

In short it was a comprehensive database that allowed the owners to keep a very tight grip on costs and client activity.

Fleetaid
Although Fleetaid is no longer in existence, Andrew created a Work In Progress database to help them manage the throughput of ex contract hire vans being tidied up prior to being returned to the manufacturers. This involved complex logic to determine which stage of the process each vehicle was at, and reporting this in a summary screen in the database whilst also allowing key operators to update the status of each vehicle as it passed through the factory.