Western Inventory Service Ltd. (Toronto, ON)

Overview:
Western Inventory Service is the largest inventory counting service in North America and one of the largest in the world. As of 2007 it has more than 220 offices and 14,000 employees. Roughly three-quarters of those employees work in the field. Operations are 24 x 7, and at peak season there are hundreds of crews on hundreds of job sites at any given time. It is a highly mobile workforce.

The Challenge:

• Design, build and implement a core line-of-business application to schedule and track all job bookings and crew assignments, as well as collecting crew time for payroll, and gathering job count summaries for production monitoring and billing.
• The same details also form an important part of the company’s quality assurance program and provide for human resource performance evaluations. To keep up-date scheduling information in the hands of those most in need of it - hundreds of roaming and often disconnected users - and to collect job outcomes from those same users in a timely manner.

The Solution:
CompuWork Pacific provided a comprehensive solution. Specific tasks performed were:

• Analysis of the information elements within the domain of interest and design of an appropriate database, including provisions for off-line access, distributed local inputs and flexible, efficient data synchronizations.
• Implementation of an appropriate communications model to support rapid on-demand exchanges of data.
• Design and implementation of an n-tier bi-directional data synchronization model, with enforcement of business process rules and automation of business processes.
• Development of an efficient finely honed user interface to facilitate access to information and ease of use.
• Integration of application with an off-the-shelf accounting system and external payroll service bureaus in the USA and Canada.
• Design and deployment of a maintenance framework to provide for long-term extensibility and evolution.

Technologies Used:

• Distributed Network Architecture (DNA), COM, Virtual Private Networks (VPN)
• Microsoft SQL Server 2000, Microsoft Visual Basic, VBscript
• Asymetrix InfoModeler (Visio) used as database design tool, Windows NT / Windows 2000 and Microsoft Transaction Server used as the application server, Win 9x / Windows 2000 Professional clients.