Taking advantage of technologies to streamline a business process saved our client several days per transaction.

Context

An electrical engineering company needed a solution for their field assessors and sales team to enter data into their home system for appraisals. The existing system included manual data entry, two FedEx envelops, and took several days to get the assessment produced and deliver to the client. It was critical for the client that with the new software the process to take less than an hour.

Solution

Finding an appropriate tablet computer with speech recognition software, hand writing software, wireless, and printing support was part of the solution to creating a faster process. BCA based this solution on a MS Windows 7 tablet computer. We were able to utilize Windows 7 support for voice and handwriting recognition. Also selected were a blue tooth printer and hands free microphone.

Because data collection takes place in the field environment where wireless connectivity was not assured our scheme included a local database that could be synchronized to the home office database when there was connectivity.

This solution included: C# code, SQL database, voice recognition, hand-writing, programmatic VPN connection, and local database and system database synchronization.