Background

S & S Steel Buildings, Inc is located in Arnaudville, LA and has been in business since 1978. They are a company of about 70 employees and growing fast. They design and manufacture pre engineered metal buildings and building components.

Objectives

S & S Steel was facing the difficulty of finding a product that fit the way they do business. They were not satisfied with off the shelf software and decided to have a custom access solution created for them by a third party. In the end the product was not meeting their needs. They had to perform too many steps to do simple operations and things like having to constantly convert measurements between fractions and decimals as well as different unit types. They were loosing customer data and the application did not provide enough validation to ensure proper data integrity. Other things that were important to them was not to have to have document and report steps to reproduce issues or have to be involved in updating their software. The constant struggle with an application that was so critical to their business pushed them to develop a stable solution.

Ensure data integrity

Our Solution

Our solution was to create a .NET 2.0 windows application to replace their old system and remove them from their dependency of micrsoft access. We created screen mock ups and worked together to develop a more intuitive and user friendly interface that stream lined their process. For example, they are now able to enter their measurements as fractions and they’re automatically converted elsewhere. They’re able to access a related invoice or shop ticket from the estimate screen with out having to switch screens and search for it. We developed a more robust application which eliminated their problems of data loss and user trust issues. Finally we deployed the application using Micrsoft’s ClickOnce deployment strategy which ensured that all of the workstations were always up to date with the latest version. We also integrated automated error reporting into the solution. The end result was an application that met their needs, functions well, simple to use, and hassle free to the client.