Christopher J Pizzi

Developed Workflow & Approval System for Booking In-Store Demonstrations

Challenge: Customer requires turn-key scheduling system in short amount of time

Solution: Rapidly build system using Oracle Application Express

One of National In-Store's clients requested that, in addition to providing retail service work, we provide and host a system to allow consumer packaged goods vendors to coordinate in-store demonstrations of their products with store and corporate management. They wanted it done quickly.

The customer's requirements specified that a vendor would request an event by uploading a list of stores and requested event dates, and a series of PDFs containing the necessary paperwork to authorize the event. The system would check the store list against a list of existing events and black-out dates, and report any exceptions. Once the whole list passed muster, the event was tentatively scheduled and the request would pass through a corproate approval chain. At each step the decision maker could approve the request, or deny it with comments, giving the previous decision maker or ultimately the vendor to re-submit the request with the requested changes. Once the request received final approval, the vendor and affected store managers would be notified by e-mail.

I built and tested this system in under four weeks using Oracle's Application Express. I designed and tested the database objects and PL/SQL objects in about a week, and created the whole user interface, including email system, authentication & authorization in another two using Oracle Application Express. After a few days of system testing and some minor changes, the application was ready for the client.