The synchronization mechanism and the database will be equally responsible for those kinds of delays, says Bill Jones, vice president of marketing at Synchrologic Inc., a developer of synchronization software in Atlanta. The key to solving problems like these is to analyze the business purpose of the remote-access database prior to any technological decisions, according to Ivinski at Maersk. Maersk sales reps and sales managers met with a consulting company, Automation Advantages Inc. in Overland Park, Kan., at the beginning of the project for what Ivinski calls a JAD, or Joint Application Design, session. They discussed their wish list of features for the application, finally winnowing the list down from what they wanted to what was possible. But at this point, each data element must be evaluated for essentialness to the business process.
Some data has to be dropped in favor of others.
This process of elimination is important, says Ivinski. 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.