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Project History

Our business customers come from diverse industries, and have varied demands. (We love variety.) Here's a sampling of some projects we've done for them over the past few years.

Performance Objectives

In 2006 we built a performance objectives management system for a pharmaceutical company's sales force. Since then our customer has come back to us repeatedly over the years and asked us to add many new features.

The system allows head office staff to define sales targets for each of their products in each sales territory. Every month the administrator loads actual sales results and the system automatically calculates a score based on the sales-versus-target percentage and the product's importance.

Head office defines global performance objectives that apply to everyone, and a manager can tweak these or add individual objectives for each representative. At the end of the sales cycle the manager assesses how each representative performed against their objectives, and assigns a score.

The system collates the sales-versus-target scores and the performance objective scores and produces an overall score for each representative. This score is the principal factor used for determining the representative's performance bonus payment.

The system is used by about 400 representatives and their managers in the field. Each person has client software installed on their laptop, and periodically synchronizes with a central server in head office. Data updates are automatically distributed to the appropriate people - for example, when a representative writes a comment on his objectives, his manager sees that comment but other representatives do not. If two people update the same data item simultaneously, the system accepts one update but rejects the other. The person whose update was rejected is automatically notified and can either accept the other person's update or assert his own.

The administrator has a more complex client application that supports back-office operations such as defining sales targets, managing territories, and running reports.

Nutrition Monitoring

In 2011 we built a nutrition monitoring system for a pharmaceutical company. The system is used in nursing homes and hospitals for monitoring the nutrition status of elderly patients.

Each month the nursing home staff weigh their patients and record the weights in the system. Using a proprietary algorithm developed by a nutrition expert and licensed by our customer, the system combines weight changes with a few other indicators such as appetite loss to identify patients who may be at risk of malnutrition.

Custom Printing

In 2010 we created a custom printing feature in Microsoft Word for a legal firm in Melbourne.

Lawyers love to print stuff. Our customer uses different coloured paper for various copies, so they can spot easily which copy goes to their customer, which copy goes on file, and which copy gets shredded. They have several different printers of differing capabilities - some are colour, some can do double-sided, some will staple your document, and so on.

They wanted an easy way to take advantage of all these features, but without having to fiddle around with individual printer properties. Especially when they're billing in six-minute blocks.

So we gave them a custom tab for their Microsoft Word ribbon. Now they can select from among all their printing options with just a few clicks on the ribbon, and the software works out the tricky details.

Investment Fund Reconciliation

In 2007 and 2008 we developed several plug-ins for Microsoft Excel for an investment fund manager. With these plug-ins our customer gathers data from several sources and reconciles them with each other to check for errors.

Each fund has its own rules, partly because they trade different types of financial instruments and partly because the figures are reported in different ways from different organisations. Reconciling these figures was an extremely laborious process, in some cases taking a whole week of boring and error-prone visual inspection by the unfortunate fund manager.

With our Excel plug-ins, the manager now pushes one button and lets the software do the hard work. Once the software has identified any discrepancies, the manager can investigate just that one instrument - with a fresh head.

Online Training Records

In 2006 and 2007 we helped a training organisation develop an online system to maintain records of who has received what training.

Our customer provides training in financial services to banks and investment firms throughout south-east Asia. Regulations in the financial services industry require professionals to maintain their skills by undertaking periodic training. Consequently organisations need to know who has been trained in what, and when.

Health and Safety Compliance Audits

In 2009 and 2010 we developed an online system to allow a hotel management organisation record their health and safety issues.

Our customer manages several hotel chains throughout the Asia-Pacific region. As part of their insurance and regulatory regime the hotels need to keep on top of health and safety issues - security, the environment, building safety, and so on.

Once a quarter, each hotel fills out an online questionnaire. The system ensures that the hotel manager answers every question and then automatically posts the completed questionnaire to head office. In head office, an administrator collates the results and produces organisation-wide reports.

Credit Card Campaigns

In 2009 we built a system for a credit card company to help them manage their sales campaigns.

Our customer sells credit card services to businesses and to private individuals. Their sales campaigns are complex, with many options that change all the time - interest rates, payment terms, honeymoon periods, credit limits, and so on. Tracking the performance of several salespersons over multiple campaigns is even more complex, partly because each credit transaction by a customer has to be tracked to the campaign during which they opened the account, but also because after a given period the account gets passed to a different salesperson. Add to that the huge number of transactions, and you can see why our customer needed help with this.

Every month our customer loads credit card transaction data into the system, works out what's what, and aggregates it into a more digestible form. Then it produces detailed reports that the sales managers use for planning their day-to-day tactics, and high-level reports in a "dashboard" format that senior management use to monitor the campaigns overall.

Compliance Training

In 2011 we built a system for a pharmaceutical company to manage their training records. The pharmaceutical industry is regulated, and professionals must maintain their skills by periodic training.

The system interfaces with Microsoft Outlook. Our customer creates a meeting appointment in Outlook and then asks the system to prepare a list of people who should be invited. The system works this out by segmenting people based on their job function or whatever, and then checking whether they've attended this course recently.

After the training event has run, our customer goes into Outlook and marks off people who attended.

The system produces reports showing things like who attended training, who was invited, how often a person attended and the date they most recently attended. These reports allow our customer to identify employees whose training is falling behind, or to identify people who should be invited to an upcoming training session, and so on.