Quinlan & Fabish

Q&F previously used an outdated Director Profile Tool for data entry, coordination, and communication to help manage their rentals and sales process. The tool was built on ASP and had a Microsoft sequel database, so it was clearly outdated and had a lot of room for improvement.

They were looking for a solution that would get the tool out of their office and hosted in the cloud, and would build on the updated technology that is available today.

They already had the business requirements and processes determined, but they spent months searching nationally for a company who could develop the workflow and provide technological solutions to their problems. Once Orases was selected for the project, we had just three months to build the system.

Since their sales process works around the educational calendars in their territories, it was mission critical that the system be fully functional in time for the next school year. Otherwise, we would have to push the launch to the following year.

In just three short months, we developed a new Director Profile Tool that manages their entire rental program and sales process, and replaces their legacy system. The system works across the entire company, from the sales representatives, to the administrative office, to the warehouse.

The sales team uses the system to keep track of the preferences of the directors they serve, as well as tracking pricing and taxes and previous year orders. The system will even generate a legacy sales report for each director or school, so they can get a breakdown of each year’s order, complete with prices and brands.

The administrative office uses the system to set global settings, like prices, so all schools, directors, and sales representatives see the same options. This helps with more consistent reporting and gives the sales reps more precise data. Finally, the employees in the warehouse use the systems’ Asset Management feature to keep track of inventory.

For example, if a sales person puts in an order of violins for a director, the warehouse can easily find how many violins they currently have in stock, where they are stored, and how many still need to be ordered. All of these functions tie into the company’s overall Task Management Program, so tasks can be assigned to specific employees and they know their daily roles and what needs to be done to complete each order.

Q&F used an existing Accounting and Inventory Management Software, AIMsy, prior to the implementation of our Director Profile Tool. We were able to integrate that existing software into our new tool to help streamline their processes and allow Q&F to continue using the data they’ve already collected to date.

One of the problems we found during the integration, however, was data integrity. Because none of their text fields had consistent requirements, all of their data was input differently. We scrubbed all of the data, implemented text field requirements, and made it easier to analyze. We also implemented a master calendar that collects all of the sales team’s meetings and school events and displays them in one location.

This helps the administrative team anticipate what instruments each school will need depending on their performance calendar. They also have the ability to create seasons in the calendar, which copies each event into the following year, cutting down on administrative time.

In the end, we were able to take a year’s worth of work and compress it into just three months to launch on time. We changed our process and combined steps to be more agile for the client, but we were still meticulous about how the product worked and spent a lot of time helping the client determine what functionalities were the most important.

Overall, our new Director Profile Tool is much faster than the previous tool they used, while still keeping better track of data and producing more accurate reports. Administrators now have more visibility in regards to what’s happening in the field, and have more control over how other employees are using the system. The product is easy to use, flexible, and scalable to accommodate future growth.