To give you an idea of specific problems we have come across, and how we solved them, we present our “Case Study” series. These posts will give you an idea of how custom software and integration can help your business succeed.
Fullerton Engineering Consultants has been providing superior design and engineering solutions for wireless network and infrastructure providers on all generations of wireless technologies for over 16 years. Their growing team of highly skilled and registered architects, engineers and designers has successfully participated in the design and analysis of over 25,000 telecommunication sites nationwide.
Their rapid business growth meant they were also outgrowing their original systems and processes for data-collection and management. In order to increase efficiency, FEC was looking to automate many of the business processes currently housed in Excel spreadsheets. This solution would not only improve the company’s efficiency but also their ability to control their data, collect and run reports on the data, and access the data directly. We asked ourselves, “What kind of system could we build to improve and automate business processes while also meeting the specific requirements that FEC had for a database?”
Our Solution: In order to design a new database system for FEC, we first took a look at their current system. The Excel spreadsheets and attempts at upgrading through the use of Microsoft Access were not providing FEC with the kind of data management they needed to support their business. During this discovery process, we gained an in-depth knowledge of the current database system and its technical components, as well as a detailed understanding of FEC’s business processes that this new system would need to support. BLC provided written documentation describing the components of the system and visual diagrams to illustrate the way data flows through the application and how the business processes interact with the system and each other.
Database Design: BLC was able to evaluate current standards and data modeling principles that would be useful and those that needed to be adjusted in order for FEC to carry out more thorough analyses. Then they made recommendations to FEC, which included a BLC team member serving as project manager of BLC resources during the evaluation and design process. In order to best serve FEC, the BLC engineers became experts in the unique business process of FEC and their associated accounting personnel. That process was instrumental in providing the appropriate knowledge both BLC and FEC needed to begin the system construction process.
Data Construction: Research from the Database Design portion of the project resulted in various plan documents that were used for the construction effort. The documents included functional needs such as financial, site and accounting requirements. Two additional pieces were created to organize the database build. The Construction Plan was used for specific deliverables and the Construction Process diagram illustrated project milestones. Fullerton can now use the database to a fuller extent and leverage it to process the numerous accounting transactions it processes every day.
“It was becoming extremely clear to us that our ability to manage our data was not growing as fast as our business was. By bringing on Black | Line Consulting we not only got a team of experts who came in to help us evaluate our processes, but we got a team who became experts in our field in order to better understand what we did and what we needed. Our new database system allows us to focus on running our company and allows us to do it better by giving us access to the data we need.”