THE TASK
Small companies often rely on simple software tools to keep track of business-critical data.
One of our clients did just that - they saved all of their product catalogue information in a Microsoft Excel file. However, as the company grew larger, it was no longer convenient or practical to use Excel for this task. An expanding business with more products and new employees called for a more sophisticated solution. With this in mind, our client turned to us to help them build one. To meet their needs, Consovenio's Microsoft developers created a powerful standalone application. Our solution did much more than the original Excel file. In addition to storing information, it offered two other very useful features: cloud support for team collaboration and approval workflow for price management.
THE PROCESS
Before designing the application, we first took our time to study the way our client worked with product prices. Each of the company's departments had its own process and requirements for setting and modifying prices, and we wanted to include these practices into our software integration solutions. (A key part of this process was evaluating competitors' prices to ensure the company's own were attractive.)
Once we gathered all the information needed to create our software, we moved on to the implementation phase. Much of the price management work handled by the client's various departments would now be replicated by our application's document management solutions and data inputs and outputs. Our application thus greatly enhanced the company's overall productivity by saving it valuable time and resources. This was because the application automatically gathered, transferred, and analyzed important data - instead of having that work being done manually by the employees themselves.
The approval workflows were especially helpful in facilitating collaboration between different staff members involved in the price management process and inventory systems - these workflows would notify managers and individuals in positions of responsibility of requests to change prices, and give them the option to approve or deny such requests. All of these benefits might be rather difficult to take advantage of if the application was very hard to learn. But this is absolutely not the case here; we've made our software easy to use by designing a user-friendly UI.
THE RESULTS
We are proud that our client's workforce has been using our application for many years to collaborate on product pricing. Why has the application continued to serve them so well over an extended time frame? It's because the original implementation described above was not final, but simply the beginning of a long-term service commitment to optimizing the solution - a commitment that involved many improvements and updates. One of them was prompted by the company's growth - as the customer's portfolio expanded, we have gone on to launch our price management solution at their other locations based in various different countries. Another one was rather cosmetic in nature - we updated the UI to match the company's new design language and colour scheme. While certainly not exhaustive, these examples show that Consovenio is ready to respond to a business's changing needs and provide professional support.