|
Problem:
A national pharmaceutical corporation has a valuable (but vast and
disorganized) set of spreadsheets and databases pertaining to their
own products as well as competitors products. The goal is to give sales
staff access to this information so as to better serve their customers
(generating more sales), and to allow sales managers to better understand
what is a very complex product line.
Solution:
After a handful of Perl, some shell scripts and a lot of thought...
We now have an SQL database and a powerful and flexible PHP front end to query
the data. Traveling sales staff can now log in to this web interface and,
given a competitors part number or product characteristics, find suitable
products for a customer. Competitors sales staff is given reduced access to
allow for the location of compatible (but not competing) products.
Database updates are now handled semi-sanely through two spreadsheets, rather
than a mess of duplicated and unmaintainable data. This is not a perfect
solution yet, but well, it's a big corporation -- they move s l o w l y.
Demo:
As this project contains proprietary data considered a trade secret by the
client, I am unable to provide a link at this time.
I am, however, permitted to provide a demonstration on a case by case basis.
(Basically, if you're not in the pharmaceutical industry or otherwise a competitor
of this client.)
Please contact me if you would like to see this in action.
Technologies Used:
Microsoft Excel and Access, Perl, Bash, PHP, JavaScript, Apache, SQL, MySQL, Oracle
|