General Project recommendations needed

amatwrestler

Let me precede everything by saying I am what the foul mouthed kids on Xbox Live call a $%&'n n00b at coding. I never really had the drive or initiative to learn even basic html, let alone something like php until recently. (my degree is in accounting) Over the last 3 weeks, I have been putting myself through a boot camp of sorts on PHP, MySQL and HTML. I can handle the basics but I am not very efficient beyond that.

So here is the rundown.

I work for a subsidiary of very, very, very large conglomerate based in India. I am an American working for their 2 US locations. The 2 US locations are call center based operations.

Current on-site applications in place:

CallCopy
eOn Equeue

eOn runs on a linux box with Apache, MySQL and possibly PGSQL. CallCopy runs on Win Server 2003 R2 with IIS and MS SQL 2003 Express (there is an API available).

The CRM tool, E.Piphany, is provided by the client and all data is stored on their side.

Customer satisfaction surveys are managed by the client as well with www.qualtrics.com. Granular results are not available, only summarized data.

Interaction with eOn is handled through SSH using Putty.

Everything is put into Excel workbooks and managed that way. This is the biggest pain in my rear as getting data from multiple channels really depends on if somebody remembers where they saved their workbooks. Some of the things they are doing with Excel are far more efficient in a database anyways so it makes no sense to copy the database to Excel and then build reports off the data pasted into Excel. (yeah, no links are created, everything is copied and pasted?!?!?!)

I need to create a portal that will enable me to quickly get to data and also generate reports. Something inexpensive as well as we are posting annual losses upwards of $1,000,000.

I have looked at pentaho, jasper, and everything I can possibly find and nothing seems to truly fit with a call center enviroment. (or at least not to me)

Is building something from scratch a better direction or finding something that is already built and modifying it to meet my needs?

Either way, there is going to be a learning curve for me as I develop my coding skills.

Any thoughts and direction on resources would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,

Amatwrestler

mrbaseball34

Everything is put into Excel workbooks and managed that way

You need to be more specific as to what is put in there and where it comes from.

In order to build a system, you must be able to determine the input (what and where it comes from) in order to get the output (your web application).

dagon

3 pieces of advice.

hire a professional
hire a professional
hire a professional

amatwrestler

dagon;10953826 wrote:
3 pieces of advice.

hire a professional

hire a professional

hire a professional

Agree
Agree
Agree

I have to be able to prove the value though first and have some sort of proof of concept up and running to demo with live data.

Honestly, the domestic (US)operations is progressively decaying and getting funds allocated for anything (including copy paper) is nearly impossible. It took me 6 months of data collection and reporting to convince the company that you can not run our current applications on Win XP with 256 / 512 mb RAM. (Sabre GDS, Worldspan GDS, E.Piphany CRM, IE, MS Office, Virus prot, screen capture app, etc...) Unfortunately most, if not all, members of the management chain do not understand any sort of decision analysis concept so simply explaining is futile. (After weekly sessions of me explaining the Pareto principle and explaining the accompanying chart for roughly 3 years, I am still the only one that understands it) I am fairly certain none of them had seen an income statement, balance sheet, cash flows until last fall (our financials are handled by our head office in India)

As far as What does "everything" mean? It truly means everything. It is a call center / business process center. 85% of the staff either answer, or support those that answer, inbound calls related to travel.

Interaction data is recorded in MySQL via the eOn e-Queue ACD/PBX. These records are reported out using some generic raw numbers presentation via Sharepoint portal. These reports are copied and pasted into Excel and then it is summarized (poorly I might add) and emailed.

Call recordings/screen recordings and call monitoring results are stored in SQL Express and are reported out through a PHP based application. Unfortunately the reports are static and require copying and pasting into Excel to be summarized and emailed.

Stationed % (hours spent logged in / hours paid) requires 3 seperate reports to copy and paste into Excel to be calculated.

Warranty Expenses (errors employees made to travel reservations etc..) are sent to us from the client and merged with our records in Excel.

Customer satisfaction surveys are recorded in Excel etc.etc.etc.

None of this is ever centralized. If I want a measurement for one employee, I have to email 4- 6 people and wait an undetermined amount of time before I get what I need. (hours, days, or even weeks) If I want to get a continous stream, I have to send a continuous stream of emails.

Generally by the time I get what I need, it is already irrelevant and I have not even reviewed the data at that point.

Albeit the real problem is not necessarily going to be fixed by creating any application but it will make my life a thousand times easier until I am able to escape to someplace that has some sort of structure to it. My job is data analysis and crafting strategy around it (I am the only member of my department).

So beyond hiring a professional, where should I begin with this. Is learning, indepth, multiple languages a necessity? I have built some Access databases to kind fill in some spots for a few items but we do not have enough Access licenses to go around for everyone so I have to be able to make something accessible to everyone.