Case Study: Dovetail Associates
Profile
Consider this assignment: You must design and build a complete sales order and delivery database in under 40 hours of working time. The final product must be user-friendly and accessible from any home or office -- 24 hours a day -- by a sales force of 18,000.
Impossible, you say? Not quite. Developer Feza Oktay accepted this challenge in late in 2001. His client? The Patriots' Trail Girl Scout Council of Boston. The product being sold? 1.6 million boxes of Girl Scout cookies.
With Feza's help, these Girl Scouts set aside their paper-based system and tried something new: QuickBase — the Web-based data sharing solution from Intuit.
Let Feza tell the story.
How did you get underway with the Girl Scouts?
"When we started talking about the cookie sale for January of 2002, the Girl Scouts had already talked to somebody else about doing the project using Microsoft Access technology. But, it was going to cost them a lot of money to do it; a price tag of $25,000 had been tossed around. And, they were talking about at least three or four months to get that system up and running.
"With QuickBase, we were actually able to whip up a prototype in a few hours and say 'It's already on the Web -- here it is.' Obviously, it was just a basic structure, but the beauty of QuickBase is, you can take an hour and boom, it's there. You've got something that's up and running on the Web right away."
Is that what convinced them?
"The two things that really struck them were the cost factor -- the whole system ended up costing them a fraction of what the Microsoft Access solution would have cost - and, the ability to know it's going to be up there in a very short time. What I kept pointing out, and what made so much sense to me, is that it was all resident on the Web."
How long did it take you to develop the application?
"We had a very tight time frame because new troops were registering up into November, and that is when they came in for troop training on QuickBase. That meant getting user accounts set up on the fly for 2,500 individual troop leaders.
"As soon as we decided to go ahead and do it in September, it was really a question of sitting down and talking to the Girl Scout sales managers and getting their perspective. We first talked with them in September, and by October we were demo-ing it.
"And, of course, with QuickBase it was just so easy to say, 'OK, now we need another field for this… or for that.' It was extremely easy to evolve QuickBase as needed. Even to this day, you don't say it's 'done' because we continue to refine it, and add new features."
"In the end, the entire project took about 33 hours to put together."
How does the QuickBase cookie database work?
"We actually created three databases which interact with each other: a cookie manager database for orders, a delivery database for shipping, and a general troop contact info database.
"When users sign in, they use a QuickBase screen name that contains their troop number and town name. Then each troop leader can simply enter the number and type of cookies sold by each Girl Scout.
"Each troop can only see their own troop's information. The towns can see 'down' to all their troops. The council can see everything, and that meant that for the first time they could track the orders in real time. Instead of having to collect and total hundreds of paper orders manually, they have all the details in front of them in QuickBase: how many cases of each cookie to each area and so on.
"For delivery, we put together style sheets to fit the delivery tickets used by the trucking firm, with the information coming directly out of QuickBase. Name, address, number of cases of each variety, and the famous 'special delivery' section: you know, 'you have to go to the back of the house and up three flights of stairs.'
"We also set the database to keep track of the cookie credits, the bonus points each girl gets for the number of cookies they sell. We even kept each scout's T-shirt size for the incentive T-shirts."
How did you train users?
"We had a whole lot of troop leaders who'd never used a computer before, at least never for this kind of thing. Ease-of-use was a huge consideration.
"The council itself did the training for troops. I did training for about 12 council members in their computer lab, and they, in turn, were able to train the volunteers.
"Once all the troops got trained, we said: From now until the end of December, just go in and play. Get familiar put whatever data you want to in there and make sure you're comfortable. Then on December 31st, we just cleared out the system and started fresh with the real numbers."
How did the users like it?
"Whenever you're dealing with a volunteer organization, you have a wide range of people, and one of the things we did was create a survey with QuickBase to solicit feedback from the volunteers. We found that over 85% of those who responded said they wanted to use QuickBase again the next year."
Was there concerns about working with an ASP?
"One of the issues for any ASP is the question of, OK, how do you get somebody comfortable with the concept? The fact that QuickBase is part of Intuit provides an enormous amount of credibility.
"You think about Intuit's TurboTax and everybody's tax returns online and the details involved in that… That carries a lot of weight."
And the final results?
"From my perspective, everything worked. The sale was a good sale. We had a lot of happy volunteers… people had been asking for quite some time for a new system. Some volunteers had been creating Microsoft Excel spreadsheets on their own for years and now they didn't have to do that anymore.
"For me, it was very gratifying to be able to provide this solution, to have pulled the whole thing off successfully in such a short time."
As a developer, will you use QuickBase for other jobs?
"Now, there are all kinds of things I know that I can apply to other clients and other situations, and I know that with QuickBase the level of complexity I need to achieve is possible.
"From a developer's perspective, you know, if somebody just looks at QuickBase they might think 'Well, that looks like a nice system but my needs are much more complex.'
"It's only once you start to understand the API and how you can use JavaScript, XSL and other tools you begin to see all the ways you can make QuickBase work for you.
"You say end up saying, 'Oh, yes I CAN do that with QuickBase.'"
