CASE STUDY: Martin Dawes / NextCall

Tools: MS-Access
Industry: Telecommunications
Application: Small CUstomer Service System

Overview

New telecom start-up NextCall engaged Martin Dawes to provide and manage provide customer support services. Village Software Engineering Limited provided a database application to support this call centre.

A Microsoft Access system was rapidly developed ready for the launch date. The system ran successfully for several months and allowed Martin Dawes to complete configuration of their mainframe system.

Return on Investment

The solution provided allowed NextCall to launch their service as planned, safeguarding a large investment. Had the solution failed NextCall and Martin Dawes would have missed their launch date.

Company Background

Martin Dawes gained fame as a provider of mobile phones. It also developed a considerable facility management operation dealing with inbound and outbound calls.

NextCal is a new 'Switchless' telecom operator. It purchases telecom services wholesale. These services were then repackaged for the consumer to provide full telecoms service with NextCall.

Situation

NextCall was due to release it's service on 3^rd January. NextCall collected results from the third party sales teams on their own systems in Borehamwood. These results were to be sent up as Excel files to Martin Dawes offices.

The NextCall team at Martin Dawes processed new customers to make them active, making welcome calls and arranging connection with four separate suppliers.

Operators needed to be able to process batches of customers and to respond to incoming calls. Monitoring data on the progress of customers' provisioning was to be sent to Borehamwood.

Solution

Village was contacted only 4 weeks before the launch of the NextCall service. At this stage the business processes were still being negotiated. The business analyst deployed by Village had to negotiate with a dozen people from six different companies to establish the requirements. Due to tight time constraints careful scheduling of the development of the system was necessary. Early functions such as registering customers were available for the launch date. Other sections of functionality, such as bill printing, were completed later.

Martin Dawes specified Microsoft Access as the development platform due to their familiarity with the technology.

Electronic communication was provided by a series of file imports and exports created in the format required by the third party telecom suppliers. This involved excel files, fixed length files, comma separated variable files and automated reading and writing of Word documents used by BT for provisioning.

Adaptation of the full mainframe system took longer than expected this meant that the temporary system run successfully for twice as long as originally specified.

Initial training was provided as part of the general preparation of the NextCall team at Martin Dawes. This happened initially between Christmas and New Year. The Village project manager and other staff were often on site to provide training and support.

Technology

Using Microsoft Access allowed the necessary speed of development. Access is appropriate for small workgroups such as the 8 desks used by the operators. If the project had been extended over a longer time Village would have recommended use of a relational database server due to the high traffic on the Martin Dawes network.

General Conclusions

Village using Microsoft Access, Borland Delphi or C++ Builder, can undertake small file server database application development such as this. File served solutions such are economical to develop but in terms of scalability above a handful of users at a single site. Normally Village would structure such a solution so that it could later be upsized to a client server solution if required.

Small file served solutions cost between £5,000 and £15,000 depending on the scale and complexity. If Microsoft Access is used it may be necessary to purchase licenses for this as well.

This situation required considerable consultancy work as well as system development. Village succeeded because they were able to understand the business situation, communicate with the large number of parties involved and develop a technical solution.