Convention Housing Management (CHM) provides hotel room inventory management services for conventions, trade shows, and conferences. CHM has three sets of clients:

• Sponsors of the conventions
• Hotels providing rooms for those attending the convention
• Convention attendees, who will be staying at the various hotels

In the past, CHM used a software application to manage inventory; track housing requests and reservations; and provide reports to all three sets of clients. This original application was old and required a great amount of manual labor to verify the accuracy of the reservation data and provide the trending reports. It was also a closed system that did not allow CHM to make use of new technologies and opportunities, such as the Internet. CHM had more business opportunities than they could manage because their original software was so limited.

Expert Support provided CHM with:

• A new customized software application that runs their housing business
• Business process reengineering assistance
• System and database administration support
• Custom reports for running their business
• Training and documentation on a variety of computer systems and applications

Custom Software Application

Expert Support built an entirely new application based on the current and anticipated business requirements. This application provides all of the previous functionality and adds considerable flexibility for business rules, a graphical user interface, an open, client-server architecture, and much more control of CHM's business. The new application:

• Reduces the set-up time for each convention
• Provides CHM management with a range of reports for the lifecycle of a convention and for the year-end summary of the business, and allows for quick development of new reports
• Greatly reduces the amount of manual labor needed to manage the inventory
• Reduces the time for manual data entry for each person calling to request a reservation
• Provides much more control over the business process and customization of business rules for each convention and for each exhibitor or attending company
• Provides an open, robust software architecture, so that new technologies can be "plugged" into the system, such as fax, email, and the Web.

The new software application is built on top of Microsoft Windows 98 and NT, and uses MS SQLServer as the database.

Business Process Reengineering

Expert Support worked with CHM to abstract their business model and redesign their business processes to work with the new software, and the new opportunities it provides. These include automating more of their business process and adding Web commerce.

System and Database Administration

Expert Support provided support in analyzing CHM's computer systems and networks. We worked with their system administrators to upgrade them from MS Windows 3 computers and a Novell Network to a full MS Windows NT system: client machines, servers, and networks.

Expert Support also installed, tuned, and managed their SQLServer database system.

Reports

For their new business system, Convention Housing Management needed a full set of reports to help manage their housing inventory, reservations, and deposits. Expert Support worked with CHM to define their reporting needs, design the reports, and build them, using Crystal Reports as the report writer. We also build a custom user interface to simplify the selection of reports and their parameters, to allow selective access to the reports based on a user profile, and to keep track of when reports are run.

Expert Support provided tools that allow reports to be generated in a variety of formats, from hard copy, to online spreadsheets, to automatically emailed or faxed versions.

Training and Documentation

Expert Support provided training in the use of Adobe FrameMaker, Microsoft Word and Excel, and in using, customizing, and administering Microsoft Windows 95/98 and NT.

For CHM's new software system, we delivered classroom instruction (classes and hands -on labs) and provided one-on-one assistance. Expert Support also developed a complete Reference Manual and User's Guide for their new software system.