case studies
Keeping upper management knowledgeable and salespeople paid
This is another post where I share technical details about a project I have been working on. SITUATION Sales executives within the company receive monthly commission checks based on active client employee counts and gross payroll, for clients that they have brought on. In addition, upper management needs to see high-level numbers such as active [...]
Microsoft Great Plains – Integration Manager in action
The company uses a version of Microsoft Great Plains (GP) that’s been customized for the PEO industry. One piece of that is Integration Manager (IM). I’ve talked about the bridge application a number of times before. With an Excel file from a client and, with some sophisticated programming, we create a tab-delimited text transaction file [...]
Every programmer should be on a testing project
I think every programmer should get a chance to be on a testing project because it will make him or her a better programmer. On one project I supported the complete software development lifecycle process to develop a multi-tiered, Intranet-based, Product Data Management System from a software quality assurance perspective. The company is a global [...]
Helping company take advantage of a tax credit
Image by alberth2 via Flickr I found out last year from the Accounting department at my current company that employers with tipped employees can get a tax credit based on how employees have reported their tips. I guess it’s the IRS’s way to encourage employers to get their employees to report tips so that they [...]
Quick Turnaround on a Benefits Audit
I can tell I’ve become branded as the “go-to” guy for certain types of projects. Last week the HR manager came to me and said that she didn’t know who else to talk with about a benefits audit the company is doing for one of its clients. The company and the client are trying to [...]
Competitive intelligence and internet visibility
You might call it competitive intelligence. Yesterday the COO of the company asked me to search the internet far and wide for any information about a certain company. I spent about two hours searching across as many search engines as I could find, and had a friend with a paid subscription to ZoomInfo do a [...]
Rapid response to payroll layout change
One hour ago I got an e-mail from a payroll specialist, telling me that a client with 107 active employees had added a column to their payroll file and asking if I could fix their bridge application to allow for the new payroll item. I opened the code, and after I made the changes needed [...]
Deploying a much-needed search tool in the workplace
We have a limited number of licenses to use the payroll management software in our organization. As we have added more staff whose responsibilities involve using that software, those licenses get used up pretty quickly. It’s not uncommon to receive 5 emails every day asking if someone would log out of the system so that [...]
Mining data from 3,000 separate Excel files
One of the consulting projects I worked on was for the finished product exports department at a global consumer products company. The company produces products that get shipped all around the world, but this particular group concentrated on North America. Because of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the company was able to save [...]
Fixing the client’s 401(k) reporting application to make it run better
The company didn’t have a process in place to make sure that this one client receives their 401(k) information on a regular basis. I had developed an application last fall for this specific client to produce the information, but there was no one set up specifically to run the application on a regular basis. I [...]
