As part of an ongoing support relationship with Rockwell Automation, iSolutions was contracted to help build a custom scheduling database for their “High Currency Lab” in their Milwaukee, Wisconsin location.
Rockwell had been using a spreadsheet to schedule their lab tests and was not able to be share and update throughout all stakeholders.
Since experiencing success using FileMaker to manage their Tool Database, the team at Rockwell wanted to see if FileMaker could be a solution for this problem.
Specifically, HCL users needed to have multiple people see and modify the lab schedule in real time and the system needed to manage the emails to the clients before the appointment with all the documents they will need it for the testing procedures. These processes had been handled by the spreadsheet, but all emails had to be done manually.
Lab technicians also had to record the test results and store them in paper forms, which made them difficult to manage and share with the customers. The new database, needed to send the clients emails from the system so that all communication can be seen by all users.
An additional department also needed access to the data for the purpose of billing the customers and now will have direct access to the data via FileMaker so they can assign the invoices to be billed and sent to the finance department.
iSolutions built a custom Calendar interface exactly to the spec of the end users. The Calendar proof of concept was created in about 7 days by the isolutions team.
The client did not require “time slots” like a standard calendar would provide, but instead just wanted visual representation of staff and customers scheduled on a certain date.
They also wanted to maintain their existing color coding from the spreadsheets they had been using.
iSolutions was able to quickly build a custom calendar interface that could be shared, but also allowed the users to interact with the dates and see a custom FileMaker popover that contained all necessary input fields.
The calendar was also optimized for peak performance over the Wide Area Network as many customers and users may need to access the calendar from remote locations within the Rockwell network system.
Emails are sent server side using “Mandrill”, a third party email tool that supports multiple attachments and other non-native FileMaker email functions. The FileMaker users can see the emails that have been sent and receive send confirmation using this tool.
