Christopher J Pizzi

RetailStream - Business Process Automation with Oracle

Challenge: Collecting data from contractors and conveying it to clients is labor-intensive & error-prone

Solution: Centralize data acquisition, reporting, payroll, and a customer portal with Oracle and PHP

National In-Store's contractors would report the results of their work by taking surveys through a telephone IVR system. The IVR system would record survey results into a generic flat file, which account managers would have to correlate to actual questions and answers, aggregate the results, and present them to their clients.

To make this process more efficient NIS again contracted Access Orlando to build a better system. I worked with the IVR vendor to develop a database schema for storing questions, responses, and contractor assignments in an Oracle database. I also developed a PHP application on top of that database to allow NIS staff to create surveys and questions and to view the status of all their jobs in real time.

This system also allowed NIS's clients to track the progress of the work NIS was doing for them. Another programmer at Access Orlando developed a PHP web framework, which I used to implement a client portal system. Customers could see aggregated survey results, store-by-store answers to individual surveys, and overall completion rate of their work.

Due in part to the efficiencies introduced by Batch Print and RetailStream, NIS was able to grow its business from $11M/year to over $40M/year over four years.

_{RetailStream marketing material}