The existing manual work order process constantly required assistance from qualified customer service representatives.

The system needed to:

• Assist the client in his selection process
• Perform the order
• Process the order

HexaGroup faced multiple challenges:

• Develop extensive knowledge of the business to provide a very intuitive and user-friendly interface, which would guide the client through a complicated ordering process
• Design a database structure accommodating present and future data requirements
• Interact with A&E's legacy system for client authentication, order processing and billing
• Integrate online orders with A&E's day-to-day workflow, as most orders were extremely time sensitive
  
  

The first phase was a thorough needs analysis to outline all workflow processes and business rules, factor out redundant functionality, so that a set of global routines could be implemented to service all work orders. With the infrastructure shaping up, another detailed analysis was done for the user interface. The concept of work order chains was formulated. A work order chain is the set of all Web pages necessary for a customer to traverse in order to completely define the required work order. They were retrofitted with a mechanism for carrying work order requirements from page to page through form variables. This strategy minimized database input and output.

Since work orders had varying data requirements, a consistent database record format wasn't possible. A strategy for dynamically producing a vertical database record consisting of many database records was put in place to handle the storage of the different work orders. This proved invaluable during development, as A&E invariably added requirements to the definitions as they were produced and presented for review. The code implementing this dynamic data structure never had to be changed when the data structure changed, saving countless coding man-hours.

With the Web application in place to create work orders from the outside, attention was turned to processing them on the inside. Another internal Web application was created for internal employees with features to help them process the work orders. View filters were implemented using cookies to allow employees to view only those work orders for which they're responsible. Employees were given the ability to complete and lock orders. Completed orders have a configurable expiration date. Once a completed order expires, the system automatically deletes it, thus automating a rather tedious responsibility.

HexaGroup completed the implementation in late January of 2001. The application went live on February 1st and work orders have been coming in ever since. A&E's vision coupled with HexaGroup's creativity and expertise in the area of Web application design and implementation have led to another example of business utilizing the Internet to it's fullest.