Support for more concurrent users and sharp business analysis yield rock-solid application on latest Microsoft Access platform.
Upgrades and enhancements to an existing Microsoft Access database application help facilitate ongoing operations and geographic expansion for Intelligent Bills.
Intelligent Bills is a professional services company that helps clients create and implement telecommunication cost management strategies and solutions. By providing clients with assistance in asset tracking and invoice management across their entire telecommunications landscape, Intelligent Bills generates cost savings for its client companies.
One of the core applications Intelligent Bills used was built in an outdated technology that was no longer supported by its software vendor. The outside development firm which had written the application had gone out of business. Intelligent Bills decided to not only update the technology platform, recoding it to the latest version of Microsoft Access, but to also upgrade the application’s capabilities. Help4Access provided a fixed price for the project—eliminating all risk of cost overrun for Intelligent Bills—that was a fraction of the cost of enterprise level packaged solutions.
According to Help4Access CEO Sasha Froyland, “Intelligent Bills was going through the kind of growing pains many small to medium-sized businesses go through. They needed us to upgrade the existing application, expand on current functionality, and enable a greater number of users. The ability of Microsoft Access to rapidly prototype makes it the ideal platform to build the type of custom solution that Intelligent Bills needed.”
Precise business analysis, fast prototyping, and preprogrammed functionality are a recipe for speed
Help4Access’ engineering team quickly turned Intelligent Bills’ high-level business requirements into a powerful, robust custom-built asset tracking application. Froyland said, “Our business analysts worked closely with the Intelligent Bills team to nail the requirements for the upgrade and the expanded functionality. Then our engineering team tapped the Help4Access Bolt-On Library for pretested functionality, coded the remainder, and delivered a rock-solid custom system, expanded to support more concurrent users and make it possible for the application to be used across multiple customer sites.”
“Custom-built solutions using Microsoft Access are cost-effective alternatives that enable us to expand the functionality of existing applications. Such solutions have the scalability to keep up with growth of the client’s business,” Froyland said. Help4Access reduce risk for the client by committing to a fixed bid and leveraging its extensive Bolt-On Library of proven code and functionality, and drawing on our project experience across many industries and understanding of their business processes.”
Takeaway: Cutting corners on business analysis and key functionality such as security yields the wrong kind of development speed. Knowledge of business processes, careful business analysis, preprogrammed functionality and agile methodology deliver the right kind of speed.
