Savings Path — Spend Management Solutions (www.savingspathinc.com)
Key business challenge: Small budget fast turnaround needed on a data entry project
"Wow, they did a nice job!", are always great words to hear and it was exactly what we heard upon completion of a BPO project for a supply chain consultancy. The firm, focused on working with hospitals and healthcare providers was looking at processing a high volume of data necessary for the fulfillment and growing of their business. They turned to Softjourn to help them find a company who could process the data fast into a workable database. Softjourn assisted in defining the project, sourced the process with a vendor in Ukraine, assisted in the process to send the required materials to Ukraine and interfaced with the subcontractors to assure they understand the industry and American terms used in the data they were processing. The results were delivered in Microsoft Access format.
| Issue: | SavingsPath prepares a wide variety of analytics for their customers, pointing out areas where savings could be achieved. Previously SavingsPath was doing the preparation and analysis of data and then pushed the information to its clients. Clients could make specific requests of the type of information that they wanted to see, then SavingsPath would use a series of queries of the MSSQL database and graphing tools to create the appropriate charts and graphs to show the clients what they needed to know. This process was time consuming for SavingsPath as a series of queries were needed in order to get the correct set of data needed for showing the relevant charts and graphs.
While the process resulted in accurate information, SavingsPath wished for a way to enable their clients to pull this information themselves from the database, whenever they needed it, and for them to be able to see it in format which would be useful to them. |
| Solution: | The solution was to provide a web-based means for SavingsPath’s clients to view their own information on an as-needed basis.
The first part to developing the solution involved converting the existing database from MSSQL to MySQL, an open source database which would not require licensing fees. Tasks undertaken during this part of the conversion included: MSSQL stored procedures needed to be understood and converted to MySQL stored procedures or PHP code, table data type conversions were completed, table data type optimization was done, and queries were created in MySQL along with query optimization. The second stage of development involved creating the user interface. For the initial proto-type it was decided that only 7 of the most commonly used data views would be implemented. This allowed the proto-type to be built quickly and enabled the results to get in front of the customer as soon as possible. One key requirement of the data views was that they needed to look similar to the current reports the users received from SavingsPath’s original graphing tool. |
| Result: | The result was a proto-type of a web-based reporting solution that SavingsPath can use for its existing clients and to show potential clients. A future stage will enable the users to have full flexibility to select the information they want to see and to choose how they want to view it. |
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