Company Profile

Evans Delivery Company, a leading trucking company with headquarters in Pottsville, PA, offers logistics and billing services to over 50 satellite terminals and offices nationwide.

Challenge

Evans presented us with a challenge to create a productivity-enhancing, user-friendly extranet that would enable its satellite offices to communicate with the legacy software systems in its corporate headquarters. These systems included Accounting, Billing, CRM and WMS. Their system's interface was completely text-based, that is, it contained text menus, dialogue boxes and reports. With their legacy system, a user could only fit a limited amount of information (text) on a screen at one time. This caused several critical problems:

• As functionality was added, the amount of screens users would have to fill out increased. If users needed to enter information on the first billing screen, and were on the fifth screen, they would have to go back five screens. If users entered information on the third screen, and then realized they needed to recall information on another section of the application, in most cases they would have to cancel-out and re-enter everything that they had already entered.
• A majority of EVANS’ workforce was accustomed to using Windows applications and was frustrated using EVANS’ existing application because it was not compatible with Windows or a Windows environment.
• The existing application required users to log into their system using a terminal application, which required manual configuration.
• Reports did not look consistent and required an enormous amount of support on the part of EVANS’ corporate personnel. The technical problems were as varied as the variety of printers used by the satellite offices.

Generally speaking, because EVANS’ existing application was very stable and encapsulated their business rules very well, it would have been cost-prohibitive to develop a new system from scratch. In other words, their legacy software was cumbersome to use but too expensive to replace. EVANS, as a company, was growing rapidly, and scalability was important, but their existing system was not scalable. Their legacy technologies were incompatible with today's popular software.

Solution

Working with their existing legacy application, we developed an extranet using the latest technologies (such as XML Web Services and ASP.NET) in order to significantly reduce operating costs, increase productivity, improve efficiency and facilitate the reduction and redeployment of personnel.

Solution’s features include:

• Administrative Functions – for multiple locations
• User-friendly Graphical Interface – for billing of clients (with a variety of options)
• Billing and other Accounting Templates – for easy recall of common accounting data
• Dynamically-generated PDF Reports – for rendering consistent look when printed on different types of printers
• Search Functionality – for calling up existing bills
• Customer Account Creation Tool – for enabling offices to create customer accounts
• Security Model – for enabling administrators at satellite offices to create user accounts for their location

Benefits

Since deploying the new extranet, Evans has significantly improved productivity, especially in the area of entering new bills and searching old bills. In addition, they are currently fielding significantly fewer support-related complaints, especially regarding printing of bills and other accounting documents. Evans, which continues to grow, has also been able to reduce the time it takes to train new terminal and office personnel, reducing training from multiple-day sessions to a mere two hours. Finally, Evans has been able to cut spending by eliminating staff significantly.

Additional Benefits:

• Takes advantage of Windows look and feel for the large number of computer users who are already comfortable with Web interfaces
• Does not require the purchase of client application software
• Insures greater productivity by grouping related functions together
• Enables users to work from different locations using their existing Internet connections.

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