Programming

The key to the successful implementation of any computer system is to make it conform your business needs exactly. Often this leads to us writing specific code, bespoke software, to perform your business tasks. These bespoke programs can also be linked to other commercially available packages such as accounting systems to further enhance their worth. It is the development of such systems that really brings value to any IT system and in turn efficiency for the company operating them. Our experience has often seen that those companies willing to invest in software solutions and the training of the staff to use them, have seen marked improvements in turnover and profitability.

Solutions include:

Order Taking Process

A telephone sales company was fast outgrowing their manual order taking process and was aware that they needed to address this with an IT solution. Having identified where the bottlenecks were in processing a telephone sale, order entry screens were written which allowed customer lookup or new account creation from the postal code and product selection from a stock code, with the option to put out of stock items on back order. Finally as the order was completed the customer could pay by credit card, this transaction is also processed by the bespoke software and automatic transaction validation and authorisation made in less than 4 seconds by the computer. Items were then queued up by the software to a national courier despatch system which created all parcel labels and consignment reports. Over the past couple of years this company has been able to despatch considerably higher numbers of orders per day with the same staff levels they had when their systems were manual.

Web Based Expense Claims

A large organisation needed to improve how they processed their staff expenses claims. With over 100 staff regularly sending expense claims each month the accounts department were spending a lot of their time re-keying this information into their accounting system when it had already been keyed into a spreadsheet by the staff member. Working with this client we developed a web based entry form through which staff entered their expenses and time records, this then automatically posted to the accounts and time recording systems using bespoke software developed at Andrews Computer Services Ltd.

Web Based Order Processing

An engineering company had developed an Excel Spreadsheet over some years to maintain order information for their production processes. However whilst the spreadsheet ‘worked’ it was limited in its abilities and offered little opportunity for further development. A new server based database solution was designed and written to take this original concept and then expand it to provide stock control, work in progress and invoicing tasks. These enhancements have transformed a single user basic spreadsheet solution to a multi user order processing system which their staff can access both in their offices and across the web.

Small amendments

In addition to the large bespoken projects, we have also made numerous small modifications: screen changes, memo pads which pop up to add notes to documents, automatic printing routines for the selection of separate bins for different paper types. Additions to stock for product dimensions, freight and duty cost fields. Over the last two decades Andrews Computer Services Ltd. have been involved with a multitude of different requests, from many different types of businesses.

These are just a few examples of how bespoke programming can improve a company’s efficiency. Andrews Computer Services understand that every company is unique and it is the creativity and flexibility that bespoke programming offers that can provide real benefits in terms of saving companies time and money.