everything in its right place
Who are they?
Austin Hayes Ltd in Leeds, West Yorkshire is an industrial coating contractor that works for various industries including the MOD, offshore, engineering, construction, chemical, water, energy and food.
Services offered include abrasive grit shot blasting, thermal arc & gas metal spraying for corrosion protection, spray painting, epoxy lining and simple welding repairs and/or fabrication. Metal is the predominant substrate, but successful projects have also been completed with plastics, wood and cement boards. The scope of work is from 1 off’s to 1000’s off batch work, handling weights from 1kg to 15T.
What they wanted
The company already had a Foxpro Windows™ application developed by a company that had gone out of business several years ago. Since they had no in house knowledge of developing database applications, they commissioned Foxsoft Ltd to develop a new application based on their current system.
The brief was to take the general functionality of their current single-user quotations/order system, parts of which were no longer applicable to their business needs, and create a new networked multi-user system with greater flexibility and functionality.
How we did it
Using his extensive knowledge of legacy versions of Foxpro and applying our agile approach to systems development, Hugh quickly gleaned sufficient information to develop an updated version of Austin Hayes' previous application - a mere 6 weeks from start to finish!
With this accomplished, Austin Hayes were then in a position to migrate the data from their old database tables and adopt the new system for the day-to-day needs of the business. Through using the updated system they were then able to outline the many new features needed to improve productivity, including creating new orders based on previous orders, producing work in progress reports, the identification of orders awaiting delivery and many others.
Quickly seeing the benefits the new system had brought, Austin Hayes also asked us to incorporate Human Resources and document management features into the system, including compliance with recent legislation surrounding due diligence when offering employment to foreign nationals. Now all of their important information is stored in one central networked location whether they're applications for employment, Health & Safety documents or training materials.
Project highlights
Turning a creaky legacy application into a networked systems accessible from any computer on their network.
Improving efficiency by revising existing procedures and incorporating procedures not available in the previous system.
Consolidating documents and information into a central repository and making them available to the right people.