What is a Web Business Application?
A good web site does more than just act as an online brochure for your company - it can capture feedback from your web visitors and serve as a delivery point for PDF brochures or other marketing material but the possibilities of the Internet go much, much further than that. We can help bring the Internet right to the operating heart of your company, levering it’s strengths and advantages to make life easier for you and your staff.
Web-based Business Applications mean that you can have a substantial functional business presence on the Internet, running on a secure server, yet accessible (literally) from anywhere in the world. To help make things a bit clearer let’s look at a couple of examples...
Online Job Management & Invoicing
Let’s take an actual example of a company that services fleet vehicles across the country, for large organisations such as DHL. They have a central office based in the Midlands, yet their field technicians who actually do the vehicle servicing on-site, are based in Carlisle, Peterborough, London, Bristol and Exeter from where they can cover their customer base. The technicians used to fill in a Job Card proforma recording the details of the job - the parts used, parts costs, time spent, MoTs carried out etc. and then at the end of the day would email or fax them back to base where they would be transcribed into spreadsheets, which would then be used to produce the final invoices.
We designed a web-based application running on a server in Northampton (although it might just as well be in the USA or Germany) which is accessible by the technicians in the field using 3G Mobile Internet modems connected to laptops - they add the job details to the database at the vehicle, parts costs are automatically allocated, a serial number automatically created and emails are sent to the central administrator carrying a link to the new Job Record. Everything is speeded up, streamlined and a by-product is that we build up a huge online database of historical records making it easy for the customer to log in and review their own maintenance history for each vehicle in the fleet - that's a Web Business Application at work.
Real Time Catalogue Production
Let’s take another example of a company that publishes a catalogue / price list of seeds and plants. It’s a functional catalogue that clients use to order from, rather than the sort of catalogue that’s left on coffee tables, and the prices and availability change regularly, so it’s imperative that the catalgue is kept up-to-date. Worse - the company has a number of offices, each responsible for different parts of the catalogue. The traditional approach would be to keep updating a word processing document or spreadsheet, passing it from office to office and then from that, produce a PDF document which is then made available, or mailed, to clients each time changes are made. A process both cumbersome and time consuming...
We produced an online database, again, on a server which is accessible from every office. A simple form-based user interface allows users to select items from the catalogue and amend the values and prices online, which are then recorded in the database. When a client requests a catalogue from the web site, a fresh, up-to-date catalogue is produced for them in Adobe Acrobat PDF format at that exact time (and carrying a ”Produced on” date, providing absolutely up-to-the-minute accuracy.
For more details and more examples see our Case Studies
If you think we can help you develop a Business Application call us now on FREEPHONE 0800 043 1954