The Voice of Pro Equine group was a project developed for the internal use of Pro Equine Group of Dallas, TX. I was contracted to develop this application through Angelwire Creative. It accomplished many goals that the company needed to complete and is in active use today.
The Problem:
Pro Equine Group was a parent company over several smaller companies that sold and managed products regarding equestrian and riding uses. Each of these smaller companies managed and oversaw their own repository of customer contacts for use in future marketing and sales information. The problem lay in the fact that many of these customers purchased products among several of their child companies at each time, and since each child company oversaw their own database of customer information, linking and managing the customers was an impossibility.
Each child company would store their customer database using a different format and different structure. Some stored their information use Excel, others a database. All stored them differently.
The Solution:
I developed a system for managing not only their child companies, but also created a powerful series of tools that alleviated the separated customer databases. A powerful upload tool allowed their user base to upload any CSV of any format containing customers and any other secondary customer information into a single database that Pro Equine Group could manage and use for marketing.
This was accomplished by developing a front-end tool that allowed users of a specific user type the power to create custom columns in a report table within a single database. They could designate each of these columns to contain a different type of data and provide a related description and name. These columns represented other customer information such as receipt information, age ranges etc.
In correlation to this, a powerful upload tool allowed them to map any columns in a CSV to the columns defined in the database table. These mappings could be saved for re-use by the user and could be shared across the chile company to which that user belonged.
Uploading the CSV against this mapping would send the information through a filtering system that would recognize duplicated customers within the upload and would either mark that entry as “to merge”, “conflicted” or “matched”. Each option resulted in a protocol that could allow administrators to handle the confictions or merging process.
In addition to the upload procedure, a tool was developed to present a Graphical User Interface to the user that would allow them to shape and create their own queries into the uploaded customer database. The results would print in an HTML tabular format with support for downloading into Excel. These reports could be saved in the form of “campaigns” that would be re-usable and re-reportable by users for marketing usage or anything desired.
These tools allowed Pro Equine group the ability to overcome their separated customer database problems with ease. But alongside of this solution a fully functioning user management, customer search tool, and company management tool allowed Pro Equine group to really manage their business better than before.
Technologies Employed:
- PHP & MySQL
- CSV parsing
- PHP Mailer
- Microsoft Excel
- JavaScript & jQuery