• Cellular Data Service
• FoodEU
• Human Resources Management Web Application
  

Cellular Data Service
Cellular Design Services provides expertise in radio frequency engineering, wireless network design and other high quality services for the communications industry.

Stylus Systems developed a website for this customer, after which we moved into a website maintenance contract. The main reasons for this were that the customer came out with a few new plans after the development of the site was complete. These new plans fell under the realm of website Enhancements. Our Customer Care team worked on an administrator section of the website that helped the customer manage content on the site in an easier manner.

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While these Enhancements were carried on, bugs and other errors were resolved within the time stipulated by the client. Also, while these Enhancements were going on, the organization had grown and a lot of knowledge had been captured in the form of articles that employees wrote. Our team added new content to the site and also made changes to the layout and user interface with the objective of giving the website a fresh and updated look. As this new content had to be made visible to a global audience, we also worked on search engine optimization and got these pages on to popular search engines.

On the whole, our maintenance work for this customer included the following:
1. Enhancements
2. Adding new content
3. Search engine optimization
4. Bug fixing and technical support

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Food EU
www.foodeu.com

We developed a web application for a restaurant chain in Europe. Read the web development case study here.

This web application had a unique feature that involved creating micro sites within the existing site. These micro sites belonged to individual restaurant owners who wished to host their services and restaurant on the main website. They could create a micro site and add or modify information as and when they wished to. Our Customer Care team worked on adding these micro sites and also updating the database with more than 250,000 restaurants across Europe.

As newer restaurant owners wished to create their micro sites, we worked on the layout of the websites, the content and also optimized the pages for popular search engines. Also, the search feature within the main website was fine-tuned to reflect the changes made in the database.

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When a web application is exposed to a global audience, it is imperative that there aren't any signs of breakdown or errors as this could lead to a breakdown in the credibility of the website. Now managing all these micro sites within a website can be a daunting task indeed. Our Customer Care team handled this challenge remarkably and made themselves available to handle any kinds of bugs or errors that cropped up. Therefore, bugs needed to be attended to immediately. We also made sure that our preventive maintenance efforts were reflected to show a functioning web application at all times.

Our Customer Care team doesn't just do what they are told. They also make sure that they understand our customer's business model and are therefore able to make valuable contributions in terms of suggesting Enhancements and utilities that would help the customer's business on the whole. In this case, they suggested utilities like report generating features; innovative search features that would help their customers reap maximum benefits from the web site.

On the whole, the application maintenance work we did included,
1. Micro site creation
2. User Interface Enhancements
3. Updating Content and the database
4. New search features
5. Search engine optimization
6. Bug fixing and technical suppor

Expected benefits: Streamlining and integrating the supply chain

• A service that opened up a rapid channel of communication to a key customer group whereby purchasers could be alerted to special offers, short-line stock, product changes, etc
• A place to post company information such as legal documentation, background product information and technical specifications.
• Agreement tracking at different hierarchies – Customized access to users from different levels.
• Help users query about supply issues, clinical and medical issues.

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Human Resources Management System Online
Stylus maintenance team has helped to remodel a HRMS site which focused on processing and recruitment of nationwide applicants for advisory positions in a large multinational financial company .

1. Scheduled several routine tasks were eating up a lot of employee time.
Manual form-based processes were automated by putting them online. Now the site is a virtual ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) solution with all employees relying on data generated by the site for some purpose or the other . It has become indispensable for day to day functioning. We made sure that the jobs ran successfully.

2. Several data sources caused a logistical nightmare
We recommended and implemented utilities on the web site that helped manage logistics and task reporting. Earlier the concerned parties were in different locations and this threw up a logistical challenge. Now, one data source ties up all divisions (internal and external) in a streamlined fashion.

3. Manual creation of innumerable summary reports
Summary reports creation is the most dreaded task for managers because of the amount of data that needs to be sifted through before creating the summary. With data being entered into a database through the website, centralized storage of data was possible. Also, reports can now be generated on the fly-with the most relevant and updated data being displayed. We also made sure that these reports were more interesting - with the usage of visual aids and graphics. Even Adobe PDF files can now be created at the click of a button.

4. The "rush of development" and underperformance.
Sometimes, the development team works against impossible deadlines. It is but natural that the best defined programming practices aren't followed during such times. What our application maintenance team did was to go through important files that are accessed often and then tune the pages for higher speed. The end results were that the HRMS site responded as much as 50% faster after these tuning efforts.

5. Database-driven web applications tend to run slowly
Any web application worth its salt is a database driven application . Hence, database tuning speeds up processing multifold. Our maintenance team looked into all aspects like the efficiency and real-time performance of this web application.

6. No job is too small for us.
a) Content modification and updation: Keeping in mind the fact that search engines pay more importance to freshly updated content, it is imperative that content on the site is frequently updated and modified. We work on such updations. In addition, we also tweak the content to ensure that the meta tags and titles contain the necessary search terms that users key into search engines.

b) Many hosting sites charge abnormally high rates to do simple, routine jobs like database changes or backups . We do it as part of our regular job.

c) Authentication and verification of data entered in the site . We could create a customized verification software or engage our employees in manually mining the data and giving you the information you need .

7. Errors that occur during run time
Run time errors caused by database inconsistencies have to be set right then and there. How many times have we seen ugly run time errors that remain on a website days after they were first encountered ? Most people never return to a site where they encounter a programming error. This reflects on the level of professionalism of your site. A maintainence contract could be taken for, say, 2 months after the site is rolled out, to weed out bugs that escape the eyes of QA (Quality Assurance) and creep up on you only during run time.

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We are working on a number of application maintenance projects at the moment. But, keeping in mind our customer privacy, we choose not to describe them here. Please contact us for your application maintenance projects here. If you'd like to know more about application maintenance and the need for application maintenance, please check out our application maintenance section here.