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Carpet Weaver's Inc is a major carpet retailer based in Illinois, USA. It currently operates twenty-three retail stores in locations throughout the state.

CWI, in conjunction with accountants John Hamilton CPA, use a Lotus Approach system to record sales, payments, costs and margins. Each store has a copy of the system and mails the data files to head office at month end for consolidation and reporting.

The Approach system had been developed in-house over several years and had come to the point where existing functions needed streamlining and new features were required to meet current reporting and accounting requirements.

CWI first contacted Northwind IT Systems in May, 2000 to review the system and develop a month end consolidation routine for the twenty-three stores. Our review showed that several performance and integrity improvements could be made and we carried out the following modifications:

• normalisation of the data tables.
• primary key in the customer table.
• renamed all fields to the dBase IV standard.
• implemented business rules through field validations and defaults.
• combined a separate application to track installer labour into the main Approach file.

We then wrote a data conversion utility to migrate each store to the new data structure. Finally, we developed an Approach application to consolidate the data from all the stores using dynamic SQL to process the incoming data as new records or update existing records in the group tables.

In 2001, CWI engaged a tele-marketing firm to conduct customer satisfaction surveys on its behalf and needed to send it a detailed sales report in Microsoft Excel format. We used LotusScript and OLE automation to render the Approach report as an Excel file. It's a combination that works very well and we have since gone on to develop similar procedures for several other Approach reports, enabling the data to interface automatically with the accounting system.

More recently, CWI asked Northwind to carry out a major overhaul of the Approach system, from the user interface to adding new tables for salesmen and payments. We reviewed (and revised) every aspect of the Approach file including the following:

• new payments and salesmen tables.
• redesigned all menus and data entry screens, created several new views and deleted redundant ones.
• reviewed all calculated fields, streamlined formulas, eliminated unnecessary calculations.
• reviewed all macros, improved existing and eliminated redundant ones.
• reviewed all stored finds defined in macros. Created a common library of named finds and revised all macros to suit.
• implemented Team Security and created custom menus for all user accessible views.
• incorporated a separate application for tracking pre-paid labour costs.
• revised all existing reports to suit the above changes and created several new reports.
• developed a data conversion utility to migrate each store to the new system.

We also recommended that CWI upgrade Approach from release 97 to 9.5, principally to take advantage of Lotus Dialogs and LotusScript 4.0 which were both introduced in 9.5.

The end result was a modern, state of the art, system that fulfils the needs of both users and management. CWI is very happy with the new system and we look forward to working with them on future projects.

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