|
Corporate Image Marketing (CIM) provides long distance services on toll fee numbers (generally that spell something) to all sorts of businesses. We also have a system that takes automated applications and faxes or emails them to the customer. When I first started work at CIM I was hired on as an Office Assistant in charge of Customer Service. I'm still there and I'm still in charge of customer service although that is not very much of my duty and generally means I'm the one to take care of issues when they happen. However my duties have greatly expanded. One of my duties is handling the billing process. At one point, I am told, this process took a week or so to complete. When I came it took several days and two people to complete the billing process. Now a single person can complete it in eight hours if uninterrupted and if a Windows machine doesn't crash. I told the CEO that I could program and that I could speed the billing process and reduce the errors. The process I learned when I got there involved copying data from a database into an excel file where it was formatted and printed. Meanwhile the customer list with the service charges was formatted in the customer database and then printed out. Starting a few days previous invoices were created in QuickBooks for each customer. The idea here is that each invoice would be ready for the data when it was available on the 1st. Also monthly service charges could be ready in this manner. Then on the first when the billing data is available this data is put into the invoices and then they are printed. Later in the day another set of billing data arrives in an excel file and is formatted and printed. Once again the data is combined in QuickBooks and invoices printed. I took that process and made programs that daily move the data from the first database to the customer database. Also routines that import the excel file into the customer database. Currently it is no longer an excel file, but a Comma Separated text file and is imported into the customer database nightly. The customer database has programs that print the data in report format, generate the invoices and export them to QuickBooks. The major time requirement is now waiting for everything to print. As this is the major time lag I have made it an automated process that starts well before I arrive in the morning (if all goes well). After that it's fold, stuff, lick and post. Not only is the process faster, but it is much less prone to the sort of errors that we used to encounter. Manually creating hundreds of invoices and entering billing data created lots of places for errors to occur. We also needed a system for our customers where they could have access to their information in a timely manner. I got to create two different systems that did this for two different types of customers. One system currently rewrites a set of web pages for each customer on a nightly basis. I'm planning on making this into a cgi process so that the data will be in real time, not daily. The other system interacts with a server that is not on-site that supplies XML data. The system phrases the XML into HTML and then presents it to the customer. The process is actually much more complex and involves a few thousand lines of code, but that's basically it. Recently I created a Employee Interface that makes it easy for sales people to have access to their customer data, but does not allow them to directly modify this data so that no required forms (or channels) are skipped. This will also make it possible for us to utilize an outside sales force while providing them with timely information that they need for maintaining their customer base. Currently I'm recreating the database using a MySQL database server. This makes it possible for multiple processes and people to easily interact with the data. Eventually all of our various processes will interact with the database. In this way we will be able to control our various systems through a single interface. I am even going to build a new application taking system that interacts directly with the database, making customization easy and expandability a reality. I've also been responsible for the maintenance, upgrading and building of the computers at CIM. I have built two Linux servers and should soon be building two more. I also did a major upgrade on my managers computer, replacing the motherboard, cpu and hard drive. I maintain and adjust the router handle occasional network wiring and am basically the guy people turn to when things aren't going right. Some time ago one of the big bosses mandated that my boss and I would perform a repetitive checking task on a remote database accessed over a modem. Basically we had to check over a thousand records to make sure that all the data was correct. This was to be done on a daily basis for an hour each until all records were checked. Then it was to be repeated. This task was extreme, tear bringing work. I put up with it for two days and then dove headfirst into the programming language that the terminal software offered. Four hours later and I had a program that would check over all the records and report back any problems in a mere two hours. I presented it and everyone was very pleased. I worked on making it more suitable for a few hours more and ever since it takes a few minutes to start up and then quietly humms along for a couple hours doing it's thing. The big boss is happy. The entire batch of records are checked each day. And no more employees bored to tears, at least not doing that grim task. In addition to all of this I'm often called on to make changes in or create web pages. I'm not the only one in the office that speaks html, but I'm by far the most fluent. Currently I'm doing the code work for a new web-site that the big boss wants to make. This has been a very different experience as I have to interact with a group. We work together with me typing away and the others making suggestions and giving me content for the pages. Also in this project I have got to work with recording audio. We have to date recorded an audio file for the site and I edited it using software under Linux. I've learned lots about this, which is very good as when I build the new IVR machine I will have to record lots of audio files. In short I've went from being an office assistant to being a Systems Administrator and Programmer. I've been programming computers since I was nine years old; but this is the first that a company has let me create and build. All this and they pay me too. The company has it's quirks, but for me right now, it's the right place to be. |