An individual simply enters the order number and the first five characters of the shippers last name to see the details of the household goods we are moving for them. Sales representatives administer the user-ids and pins for their corporate customers. When a PIN is lost, the corporate customer contacts their sales rep to issue a new one. Corporate customers can also request a quote or price estimate by filling in a Web questionnaire. There are many little tedious things that I don't have to think about anymore, like finding an available indicator to reverse image a field in error.
Testing is also easier, since there is less new code to test.
It has now become painful for me to go back and maintain RPG programs. Right now we are working on giving our corporate customers Web-based query and reporting, but many of the calls our customer service staff receive or initiate are with the entities that carry out the actual relocation. We do have an EDI solution in place, but most of companies we do business with are not large enough to justify an expensive EDI solution. Now that we have the framework in place that should only be a short step. Development began in June and the application went live in August, just seven weeks after the project started.