Transcripted and summarised notes of interview with Allen
Please describe your business.
A small building company that currently has approximately 30 employees. We have 5 completed projects and all are sold out, as we have dedicated investors and buyers that favour our apartment designs.
What is the current situation and problem(s) that your business is facing?
The main problem is as my business is expanding in terms of its customer base and storing and managing data is becoming a problem. As we are currently using a paper-based filing system then inputs it into excel spreadsheets to store the various data. And I have found it “difficult to maintain the data” as I have an increasing amount of tasks to complete and separate programs and files for various information isn’t the most efficient way to complete his tasks. Also my employees also pointed out that I often made same mistakes, for example assigning the same account, editing or removing a customer from the list was a problem as he has large amounts of customers to search through and could edit other customer’s details accidentally.
Do you have any ideas or directions you would like to approach towards to solve the current situation?
I am not very sure, as I mostly just use the programs that came with the computer or a few specialist design and calculation programs for the apartment designs. But I strongly think that the current system is inefficient and inadequate.
Are there any requirements for the product, for example, which types of software do you have, what expertise do you have in them?
I was thinking about a dedicated management software system that replaces the paper based filing system and excel spreadsheets that we are currently using. I am very similar with Outlook as that is my primary email program that I use everyday. Otherwise, I can only use simple programs that have user-friendly interfaces.
I am currently thinking about a java program with a MySQL database, so its just a dedicated
