Once the business elements have been determined, the Maersk sales group passed that information on to the project developers. Broden Inc., a systems integrator in Mountain Lakes, N.J., built the application for Maersk on top of Microsoft SQL Server on the back-end and Microsoft Access on the client. A team of five developers worked with sales professionals to create an application that lets reps receive information from the corporate database about what shipping containers are available. This tells them what kinds of cargo for which they should be soliciting orders. The flow of information is bidirectional, so the field sales people can also provide nearly instant information back to the corporate office.
Executives can use the information to make corporate-level decisions that are much more timely.
One crucial element of the development process was legislating the frequency of synchronizations, Ivinski says. If users don't replicate to the database regularly, the changes are too large, and take too long to download. This can be largely a training issue, although reminders can also encourage more regular syncing. Too many changes just took too long. Every level of decision-making is more efficient now, Ivinski says.