A mobile solution on an iPad, iPhone or iPod touch is an excellent way to carry around a portfolio of previous work.  Quotes can be generated and emailed to the client immediately after a client visit whilst the details are still fresh in you mind.  Orders can be taken off line and then sent back to the office for processing.  Stock and price lists can be updated reqularly on the mobile device as can lists of customers, propects and appointments.

Our solutions are designed specifically for mobile use can be configured to cope with dubious connectivity by using a robust synchronisation mechanism

Not knowing where each member of a team is at any time can cause chaos such as double booking and impossible journey times between customers.

By integrating a job management solution with the individual calendars of personel on the road and pushing this information out to smart phones, double booking and overcomittment can be avoided.   team members can see where each other are and make informed decisions as to reallocation of jobs.  individuals can move appointments by agreement with customers and have these changes quickly delivered to other members of the team as well as updated at the office allowing oversight by management as well as flexibilty for staff on the road. 

The bespoke solution developed for BioMarsh was a multiuser database designed to fit closely the business process in use by the company. Job details are now entered only once and the job schedule produced automatically for single and multiple site visits. Daily jobs sheets for the drivers are printed at the click of a button and the jobs are also sent electronically to the devices in the vehicles which also record arrival and completion times as well as collecting customer confirmation signatures. The solution includes a comprehensive system for tracking the status of jobs and produces job tickets and invoices as well as providing sales ledger entries ready for import in to the accounting software.

The benefits of this bespoke solution that continues to evolve to meet the needs of the business are many and has supported significant growth in turnover whilst keeping administration costs down: 10 admin staff now manage 90 vehicles which complete 68,000 jobs per year. That is a 500% increase in turnover with only a 100% increase in the number of vehicles and admin staff. The solution also ensures better more consistent customer service as well as ensuring that none of the more than 1,000 jobs scheduled each week is missed or forgotten.

Hosting your databases on one of our well connected servers opens up the ability to access your data from anywhere with an internet connection, run overnight scripts, take advantage of our hourly backup system, and have the reassurance of knowing that a backup server is waiting in the wings.

Hosted databases can be accessed by iPads and iPhones, web browsers (using php and instant web publishing) as well as conventional FileMaker desktop clients.

We can host just part of a solution that needs to be accessed on-line or the whole solution.  For smaller operations it makes using FileMaker server more practical and affordable.

The timetable requirements of a dance school do not lend themselves to fully automated timtable generation.  The physicality of the classes needs to be taken into account when scheduling.  In addition, some degree of personalisation is required for the majority of students. 

In the absence of full automation, a solution was developed that enabled students to be added to classes both individually and as a group.  Visual indications are provided to show conflict counts for students, studios and teachers.  These indicators are updated in realtime when moving a class to a new time slot.  It is also possble to pick a time slot and see whch classes are running and which students are free on a single screen.  Students are then dragged into the approprite class. 

The combination of individual and bulk manipulation of students together with the comprehensive conflict indicators has significantly improved the timetable generation process as well as vastly reducing the paper print outs previously required to deal with conflicts.  In addition each student now receives a personal timetable by email and can no longer blame timetable complexity for missing a class!

The gross pay calculations for more than 50 drivers based on clocking on and off times was taking at least a day a week.  This involved entering all times from paper time sheets into a spreadsheet before calculating overtime (before and after the standard daytime hours), on call, productivity and overnight bonuses as well as holiday and sickness absences.

The initial automation process reduced the calculation time to about 20 minutes!  Continued evolution of the solution now has the drivers clocking on and off by scanning a personalised barcode and has allowed further reductions in costs by making it possible to move to a monthly rather than weekly  payroll.

The final part of the solution is a data export that  provides all the necessary information for HMRC PAYE and NI calculations.