This system provides additional benefits. In conjunction with warehousing data, it provides for a call tracking and customer problem resolution system. The custom system can feed off any Order Entry system, which is critical to the future growth of the application. This makes the system easy to navigate and the database easy to customize for this proprietary application. To run searches on the data warehouse, there is no need to know any special programming logic like the Boolean type used in many search engines.
New users are able to learn the system very quickly.
Next phase and future plans at Franklin are focused on integrating the Internet into the client server order entry system. The data warehouse is currently in SQL Server 6.5 and will be converted to SQL Server 7, the latest and most sophisticated version.