CS Design

When I started working for Merrions Ltd I noticed that it was very time consuming to submit a job. The process involved taking notes via phone or email from a client and then writing a brief. This brief was then contained within an A4 folder that made up the job bag.

This folder contains all work pertaining to the job i.e. artwork designs, email print outs and quotes.
This became very hard to organise when more than one person needed the job bag at any one time as information would go missing or was not updated and thus not everyone was up-to-speed with the job's progress.

I came up with an idea and presented it to the business as the Merrions Job Management System (JMS) and was allowed to proceed with a trial version.

I developed the first JMS in Coldfusion MX 7 with a Microsoft Access Database.

I decided on the following functionality:

1. A roles based user system with Merrions employees being "admin" users
2. Integration into Sage Job Costing System (accounts software)
3. A central job bag
4. Email storage central to each job
5. A file repository for each job
6. A quotes system for submitting and storing quotes

I set up the JMS so that a client could log into the system, create a new job which is instantly submitted to Sage, allocated with a job number and made available to all users with an admin role, or part of the same company as the user who submitted the job.

Once the job was submitted by the client, any emails sent via the job bag are recorded in the database keeping a log of all communications. Any artwork could be uploaded to the file repository along with any other relative files.
Quotes could also be submitted by admin users for approval by the client.

All in all Merrion's clients found the JMS invaluable; it's easy to use interface and key functionality help increase productivity for both Merrions and its client's.