Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
Something I'm kind of stumped on today.
This dick that I do work for, hereafter known as "dick", has an Act 2008 setup. He has apparently been using Act for his very limited CRM needs for about 15 years. I'm talking Windows 3.1-era, here.
So he has an accumulation of Act data. Maybe 20000 customers.
He has 10 employees. Nine of them spend all their time in Act just collecting customer contact info and maybe making a note that there was a sale on some date.
One employee's entire job is to schedule and place calls to each customer on a rotating basis, just to see if they have any new orders. The number of calls she completes and then reschedules for some date in the future is basically her metric of performance, insofar as the dick looks at a report about her activities every few months.
Oddly enough, this poor woman's Task List in Act, the equivalent of a Schedule in any program you've ever seen that does schedules, has about 3,000 scheduled calls in the next three months.
She says "Boy Act is sure slow!" Which it is, since it's making probably 10 queries that return results of 3,000 items just to display what's on her computer screen (their database file lives on a file server... where accessing the same information is still glacially slow) plus feeding in to who knows how many reports.
The Act people tell me there's a hard limit for "reasonable" performance of their database, and that limit is around 1,000 scheduled activities. The Act people say "You need to change how this person works to suit our software."
Which, OK, wow. That's a dumb thing to say. If it's a limit, make it a limit, guys.
Even if I divide up her workload (say, make each single month worth of calls its own username and task list, or divide the calls AM and PM as distinct lists), she's going to need to look at the full list of data at times.
The Dick just wants to implement a heavier CRM package like Microsoft Dynamics. He's not even really using the features Act has now, just a contact list and the tasks that one woman sets.
I'm thinking there's got to be a smarter way to have this woman work so that she's not setting 1000 appointments a month. I'm drawing a blank on what that better way might be.
Ideally I'd like to see the dick just go with some custom app (built on what? No idea), but I don't have time to deal with that. I need to get this poor woman in some kind of shape where she can work (which she can't, when it takes 30 seconds to make an update to her task list).
This dick that I do work for, hereafter known as "dick", has an Act 2008 setup. He has apparently been using Act for his very limited CRM needs for about 15 years. I'm talking Windows 3.1-era, here.
So he has an accumulation of Act data. Maybe 20000 customers.
He has 10 employees. Nine of them spend all their time in Act just collecting customer contact info and maybe making a note that there was a sale on some date.
One employee's entire job is to schedule and place calls to each customer on a rotating basis, just to see if they have any new orders. The number of calls she completes and then reschedules for some date in the future is basically her metric of performance, insofar as the dick looks at a report about her activities every few months.
Oddly enough, this poor woman's Task List in Act, the equivalent of a Schedule in any program you've ever seen that does schedules, has about 3,000 scheduled calls in the next three months.
She says "Boy Act is sure slow!" Which it is, since it's making probably 10 queries that return results of 3,000 items just to display what's on her computer screen (their database file lives on a file server... where accessing the same information is still glacially slow) plus feeding in to who knows how many reports.
The Act people tell me there's a hard limit for "reasonable" performance of their database, and that limit is around 1,000 scheduled activities. The Act people say "You need to change how this person works to suit our software."
Which, OK, wow. That's a dumb thing to say. If it's a limit, make it a limit, guys.
Even if I divide up her workload (say, make each single month worth of calls its own username and task list, or divide the calls AM and PM as distinct lists), she's going to need to look at the full list of data at times.
The Dick just wants to implement a heavier CRM package like Microsoft Dynamics. He's not even really using the features Act has now, just a contact list and the tasks that one woman sets.
I'm thinking there's got to be a smarter way to have this woman work so that she's not setting 1000 appointments a month. I'm drawing a blank on what that better way might be.
Ideally I'd like to see the dick just go with some custom app (built on what? No idea), but I don't have time to deal with that. I need to get this poor woman in some kind of shape where she can work (which she can't, when it takes 30 seconds to make an update to her task list).
