Beechwood Consulting - Database Services

Some examples...

Beechwood has worked on two recent high profile web projects for the Energy Networks Association (ENA):

ESMF Security Incident Reporting System (SIRS): The Electricity Security Managers Forum (ESMF) is concerned with all aspects of security on the electricity network. Theft, in particular, has become an increasing problem in recent years largely due to the steep rise in the cost of commodities such as copper and steel. The ESMF Security Incident Reporting System (SIRS) was commissioned by the ESMF in 2008 to provide a national scheme to collate security incident data and provide a resource for the various agencies charged with tackling the problem. The system is a ASP.NET 2.0 application, which uses SQL Server as the data provider and includes a moderate level of integration with third party components for reporting in PDF format and for file organisation and compression. It went live in November 2008.
Project Management System (PMS): During 2007 the ENA recognised that important information was being lost when staff leave the Association because documents, meeting minutes etc were not being held in a structured way. After staff left it was found impractical to access their files, documents, notes, meeting agendas and minutes etc. The core requirement of the PMS was to address the issue of corporate memory loss by providing a common interface and structure for recording various types of data against the circa 120 active projects being managed by the ENA at any time. It was also important to start to record and report on costs associated with each project. The system is an ASP.NET 2.0 web application - SQL Server is the data provider. The system makes extensive use of advanced ASP.NET controls such as the tree view, which is used extremely effectively to display the project hierarchy. It went live in January 2008.

The Fraud Advisory Panel (FAP) is the trade association for organisations and departments charged with tackling fraud of all kinds. It has an existing MS Access membership database, which needs ongoing support and development. Beechwood and its close associate company, PowerDEV Limited, have considerable experience providing IT services to the Not-For-Profit sector with clients including ACPO, the Athenaeum club and Friends of the British Library. The FAP database is straightforward and Beechwood turns round requests for minor modifications very quickly and at a very competitive cost.

British American Tobacco (BAT) needs no introduction. They have arrangements with the retail chains that they supply that sales figures be made available to BAT. The retail chains live up to their obligation but aren't particularly motivated to provide the data in a clean format. Beechwood has been commissioned to build Access systems to import the raw data from Excel, cleanse and convert it, run checks on the data integrity including a checksum and to output the clean data in a specified CSV format for upload to BAT's SQL Server based data warehouse. Systems have been built and delivered to process data from two retailers in March and April 2006 and projects to provide similar systems to process data from different retailers are envisaged.

The Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) represents mechanical engineers and is one of the few institutions able to award chartered status to engineers meeting the necessary standards. It has a large overseas membership and supports various sub-branches around the world. These branches have members and hold events of their own and this information is available from the IMechE Near You website. The site is a collaboration between developers at the IMechE working on Microsoft Content Management Server (MCMS) Components and Beechwood's developer who designed and implemented the complex data structures dictated by the nature of the IMechE's international membership and implemented searches etc. The site is built with VB.Net, MCMS and SQL Server 2000 - it went live in March 2006.

Survey Solutions are a dynamic company providing data gathering and presentation tools for a wide range of organisations. Beechwood was commissioned to build an ASP web system to control and implement an entire 360 degree peer assessment program incorporating considerable workflow. A top level system administrator inputs the details of a 'facilitator' who is immediately emailed with a request to input members of staff for the peer assessment process. When he does this, the assessees are emailed and requested to log on securely to input details of 15 peer assessors and to complete a self-assessment. The assessors are then emailed and asked to participate in the survey. Their responses are collated on the web server along with data from an on-paper source, which is read by a machine and uploaded in Excel format. When the number of responses reaches configurable targets the system builds a graphical PDF report on the server and this is emailed to the facilitator and the assessee providing an important source of data in assessments. The system has been running live on a colocated Windows 2003 web server since April 2005 - it is built with Active Server Pages (ASP) and SQL Server 2000, which are integrated with Access, Excel and a PDF writer on the server and is subject to a support contract. The system is private but details can be found here.

Morris and Spottiswood are the largest player in the shopfitting market in the North of England and Scotland with the larger supermarket chains amongst their clients. Their procurement database was built some time ago by inexperienced developers who had since left the organisation. The procurement team found novel ways around the system's defiencies leading to some extremely poor quality data, which impacted on system performance to the extent that it became unusable in the Manchester office. Beechwood was called in to port the system to SQL Server, make a wide range of general improvements amounting to a partial re-write and optimise it for use in a WAN environment. The new version was implemented in the Glasgow office in December 2004 and rolled out to the Manchester office the following month.

Rapco Limited are a small manufacturing company based in Basingstoke producing very specialised electronic devices including frequency reference systems for satellites. Beechwood Consulting was commissioned to build a client server MS Access stock database system to replace a very dated DB3 system, which had been serving the purpose adequately since the early 90s. A large volume of assembly and stock data from the DB3 database was converted at the time the new system was implemented. A number of organisations offering off-the-shelf manufacturing and stock control databases were approached prior to Beechwood's engagement but none were flexible enough for Rapco who's approach to the management of stock control around its manufacturing processes has elements which are non-standard. The system went live in June 2004 and Beechwood has supplied some additional functionality and reports since.

Beechwood has also worked on a number of high profile projects commissioned by the Energy Networks Association (ENA). These are critical systems and have been subject to comprehensive support contracts since the first went live in Spring 2001:

The Health and Safety Group website publicises the group's activities and allows members to view details of past and forthcoming committee meetings, download minutes, agenda documents and papers generated by meetings. Members can also download HSG publications such as the Annual Safety Report. The system is essentially a simple (but elegant) content management system providing a window to the group's activities.
The development was unusual in that there was considerable design collaboration between our consultant and the client at the ENA and the system was built combining basic ASP pages on the site that can be accessed by users, coupled with the power of the Visual Basic IIS application builder for the admin side of the site. SQL Server 2000 provides the database backend and the site is hosted on a colocated dedicated Windows 2000 web server. The site is private to members of the ENA and only the public pages can be accessed by non-members.
Again for the ENA's Health and Safety Group, the Accident Database System (ADS) allows ENA member companies to report accidents online. It also allows members to interrogate the database to examine their accident statistics.
The system was converted from a DB3 system developed in the mid-1980s. Such was the complexity of the structure of the old data, which used hard copy coding tables amongst other archaic devices, that data conversion and cleansing (e.g. identifying and removing duplicate records) made up around a third of the entire project. Again, the ADS is private to ENA members.
The Document Catalogue System allows users to search, browse and purchase various kinds of engineering documents online.
ENA members have access to confidential documents and benefit from reduced prices but, unlike the other ENA systems listed here, non-members are able to access the entire site and can purchase documents. The system is integrated with WorldPay to take credit card payments.

Infin IT are a dynamic, forward thinking IT support company. They wanted their Access based call-logging and work allocation system to be integrated with their PDAs so that they could enter information into their PDAs when on a client's site and upload it to their central system on return to the office. Critically, the system enabled the client to 'sign off' the work on the PDA and would then upload the signature file to the central system. The system then automatically builds an Access snapshot report including the client's signature and emails it to the client, so that they have a record of that day's site visit complete with their own signature. The system helps to maintain the client's awareness of the work being done on their offices and is designed to put INFIN IT in a strong position should any problems arise regarding invoice payments.

The NHS Confederation represents the interests of the NHS. They have recently replaced their old membership database with a new system but came to Beechwood before the change over for some minor amendments and fixes to their old Access based system. On one occasion, the NHS regions had been re-structured and our Access expert was called in to convert existing data in a lookup table and reformat the associated drop down list on a form. The cost - Ł75.