Omega Studios is one of the largest photography studios in the United States employing over 100 employees including over 50 photographers.  For 10 years they had been operating on a Wang network and software system which had become increasingly difficult and inflexible to maintain.  Eventually, they chose to totally replace the old system with a PC based Microsoft Windows NT platform.

They picked Lloret Data Systems to build a custom application that would perform 6 primary functions:

• Track the location of up to 1 million pieces of merchandise that would come through their studio each year.  Merchandise included items ranging from sofas to boxes of cereal. 
• Track each shot that was photographed and processed by the studio through its 10 stages of production
• Provide real-time information to everyone in the company relating to shot status, merchandise associated with each shot and scheduled shooting dates
• Optimize the studio floor scheduling matching available studio sets with photographers
• Provide Work In Process costing information to be used in financial accounting
• Keep maintenance records for over 1 million dollars worth of photography equipment

March:

The project began and interviews were held with almost every employee in the company.  Multiple planning sessions were conducted with each department to determine the actual needs and to strategize for ways to improve productivity.

April:

The final suggestions were presented with opportunity to review areas of concern regarding the core design.  With consensus from each department, the development process began simultaneously with the installation of hardware.  At all stages of development, key employees were updated with the latest user interfaces to insure that user expectations were being met.

August:

The first parallel jobs were run on the new system.  Once people began working heavily on the new system, new time saving ideas were implemented as more people used it.

September:

The merchandise data was transferred from the Wang to the new database. 

November:

The system was fully deployed.  As one employee put it:

"I have been here for 10 years and this new system is hands down more efficient and user friendly than what we were used to."

For the first time, every department has complete access to real-time data and is able spend more time on managing projects than managing information.

• Being able to fax status reports directly to clients from the database
• Company-wide e-mail, word processing and spreadsheet capabilities
• Internet availability
• Automated upload of merchandise from client files eliminating data entry work
• Professional reporting on laser printers vs. the wide green bar reports
• Intuitive user interfaces which reduced training time
• The ability to view complicated data in many different formats
• Automated field lookup and searching capabilities
• Hundreds of data entry validation messages and dialogs
• The consolidation of multiple independent office tools into one system

• Front end user interface used Delphi 4.0 Client/Server development package
• Interbase 5.5 is the client/server database
• All workstations are installed with Microsoft NT Workstation
• Compaq Proliant Pentium 200 dual processor server; 512 meg RAM; 22gb HD
• Symbol desktop keyboard wedge scanners for bar coded merchandise
• Symbol radio frequency portable scanners
• NEC thermal transfer bar code label printer
• Embarcadero ER/Studio data modeling for design and database development