 Query-By-Form System
The Requirements
This client in the publishing
industry needed to provide its outside sales staff with detailed
customer demographic information so the sales force could answer complex
questions from prospects while still meeting with a prospect.
-
There were nearly 20 different products to be supported by this system,
each with a unique sales force and query approach.
-
Salespeople needed to be able use the system with little training and no
technical knowledge.
-
Each of the 20 different products had several hundred thousand rows
of data to
query.
The Solution
We developed a series of nearly 20 separate Access applications
for this client. Each application was similar to the others, but had a unique interface
tailored to its particular product. We created a point and click query
interface that the sales force found very easy to use. On this project we
worked with the client's Information Services staff which provided us with data definitions
and data downloaded from the client's mainframe. Their IS staff
maintained the data long-term.
Technology, Tools and Innovations
We used Microsoft Access and generated dynamic SQL
to query the database based upon data selected on a form.
|
 |
Query-By-Form |
 |
|
Needing to know specific information,
we created a form from which the sales force could
point-and-click to what to include in the WHERE clause
of a dynamically generated query. |
| Adaptability |
|
The underlying architecture of this
application was modified to customize the application
for many different products. |
| Metaphor |
|
These systems provided the same
user-interface metaphor for use with similar products. |
|
