Management System Design

Conekt Management Database

Inceptive recently completed the Conekt Management Database, a web based customer relationship management and sales opportunity capture tool for TRW’s in house engineering consultancy Conekt. The database enables any employee within Conekt to register a sales opportunity in a web front end and this sales opportunity then passes through a series of statuses until a quote is accepted by the customer. The system provides downloadable management reports in Excel format, printable Word documents and also provides sales staff with immediate access to previous customer activity.

Inceptive followed the design process below:

» Definition of Requirements:

Working with Conekt management, Inceptive was able to take the business logic already in place and clearly define how this would be enabled in a database driven web application. Capturing the requirements in this way ensured that both client and developer had a clear understanding of what the application needed to provide.

» Concept Design:

Taking the Defintion of Requirements document as a guide, Inceptive set about designing the database and web front end. It was important that the application ran as efficiently as possible as this is a multi-user system and its data is crucial to the day to day running of Conekt. Various protoype sessions were held with Conekt employees to ensure that the front-end design and layout was as intuitive and ergonomic as possible. Once the prototyping was complete, the entire concept design was documented to ensure a clear understanding between client and developer of how the system would work before any code was cut.

» Programming:

With the Definition of Requirements and Concept Design signed off by Conekt, the developer was able to build a three tier web application using ASP, ActiveX DLLs and SQL Server 2000.

» System Testing:

The Inceptive team spent a month rigorously testing the Conekt Management Database before delivery to Conekt.

» User Testing:

Conekt was given one month to user test the system to ensure it worked and met the specifications laid out in the Definition of Requirements and Concept Design.