Design Access

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Caraustar is made up of many companies and locations spread throughout the U.S.. With Designers in many different locations and Customers located everywhere, they wanted a way to bring together their Designers in a system that would allow them to gradually expand to include their Customers.

The system which we built for them is their Design Access system. This system provides a way for the Sales Representatives or Customers to enter a Request for a new Design or an update on an existing Design into the system. Along with the request, the specifics of the design can be sent as well as the persons to whom samples should be sent.

This system's key highlights are:

A workflow system which allows a baseline workflow to be used for all customers, as well as the ability to add a custom workflow for each customer.

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The ability to pull up each Request and see the specifics as well as history pertaining to the request, and those other Requests which may be related to this same project

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A free-format online files system where designers can share their designs with each other and search through designs for given file names.

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A notification system within the workflow which allows for specification of who should be notified at each node along the workflow, as well as options for the users to by-pass notifications if they so choose. Each node has the ability to specify different interested parties for notification, or no notifications at all.
Integration with Artios-CAD in order to generate thumnails of designs that are uploaded.
A filters system which allows Caraustar employees to see those Requests assigned to a specific designer, or to only follow the Requests for certain customers, as well as the ability to specify which statuses the parson is interested in seeing.
The ability to generate the ISO compliant documents in PDF format needed by some of the facilities.
Online Reporting which provides a summary report as well as a link to those Requests cited in the report for drill-down to specifics.
User preferences which include displaying the thumbnails within lists. Preferences also include the ability to specify out of the office and another designer to forward all incomming requests to for each customer.
System Administration which allows for Customer, User and Security Group maintenance. Security allows both user and group level settings to be specified.
Optional Context menu which is implemented within lists in the system where it aids in the functionality of the list.