Case Studies

An example of a project where the customer had a small IT department.

Company Profile	Engineering Manufacturer
Location	West Midlands
Project Outline	Creation of CRM, Enquiry Management, SO, PO, Warehouse Management software - data cleanse and input from legacy system. This scale of this project dramatically changed the operational effectiveness of the customer. The project initially required many weeks of specification and process mapping to fully understand the current operation of the customer before the process could be mapped to the new system. The project needed to integrate with an existing and live ERP system. The data was required to be extracted and imported to the new system without causing a hitch in live production. Quality Assurance servers were used to plan and test the rollout before going live. The project was handed over with a 12-month support package agreed for maintenance and user support.
No of Users	15 - 20
Technologies
Front End	VB & Crystal
Middle Tier	VB - DLL and COM
Back End	SQL Server
Other information	Integration into Sage, Database, extensive use of DTS, Automatic Email, utilisation of bar code equipment
Non IT Support	Purchase order and Sales order processing.

An example of a large scale project where the customer required modification to an existing product.

Company Profile	Vehicle Manufacturer
Location	Europe
Project Outline	Quality Management Database. A customer needed to improve its quality control while tackling supplier quality issues. A current product in the marketplace, which met 60% of the project needs, was chosen as the backbone. The remainder of the requirements were built to achieve the project goals. A customer-facing tool was built to collect customer feedback via the web along with a statistical package to report upon supplier performance when considered against like product groupings. The project used full-scale development, quality assurance and production environments before being rolled out globally.
No of Users	500+
Technologies
Front End	VB, Crystal (Citrix), Web IIS
Middle Tier	VB - DLL and COM
Back End	Oracle
Other information	Automatic Email, XML, Integration with legacy systems, utilisation of bar code equipment
Non IT Support	Supplier management and continuous quality system improvement.

An example of the development of a brand new product.

Company Profile	Inter Government and Education Agencies
Location	Midlands
Project Outline	Information push to PDA's through the web and server installation. In order to support a tourist initiative in the Midlands, an interactive information system was developed. The project used Wi-Fi technology to create hotspots in and around a town centre. Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) would be used by tourists when walking/travelling about the town. The PDAs were able to detect which hotspot they were in and request information via an internet server to display relevant information to the user regarding the areas of interest in their immediate vicinity. The project succeeded in its aims and was very well received by the tourist authority with a national press release. The scheme is now scheduled to be rolled out in the UK at other sites.
No of Users	60+
Technologies
Front End	PocketPC 2003, Embedded C++, Web (IIS)
Middle Tier	NDIS Drivers
Back End	SQL Server
Other information

An example of a Rapid Application Development (RAD) project.

Company Profile	Transportation Company
Location	East Midlands
Project Outline	Front end to control and query Baan Export file. An existing Baan database was in use by a large transportation company. The user interface and batch process did not express the availability of stock against the sales order items. A RAD methodology was used for the project in order to prove the value of the reports generated. The project provided the information over the twelve months required to prove the proof of concept. The reports were later rolled out to the whole company using a full scale production server.
No of Users	10
Technologies
Front End	VB, Crystal
Middle Tier
Back End	Access
Other information	Data Pull from Baan into Access for Crystal reporting
Non IT Support	Project Management

An example of application development in conjunction with an existing IT department where the IT department is in another country.

Company Profile	Tier 1 Automotive Supplier
Location	South Wales
Project Outline	Production Monitoring Software – Automatic monitoring of various key parameters (Quantity Good, First pass rate, Yield, Changeover times, Machine utilisation). A site with 14 manufacturing lines required real-time information to inform the management team as to the location of problem areas. The lines could only output their information as text delimited flat files. The output was provided by the IT department, which was based in Italy. A routine was developed to regularly poll the text files of each line and extract the data. This data was loaded into a SQL database. The new data was processed every 60 seconds to update a control screen. Shift reports were calculated at the end of each shift. The management team used the system to substantially improve internal workflows and procedures.
No of Users	4
Technologies
Front End	VB
Middle Tier	VB – DLL
Back End	SQL
Other information	Data import form all production lines using polling routine
Non IT Support	None

Case Studies of Systems Development from WIT Systems