Visual WebGui Case Studies

“By removing the barriers of the local network, Visual WebGui has changed how we can do business” said Lloyd Everist, General Manager Dawsons Group.

Overview
Dawsons Group of Companies is an Australian based mixed business. The range of business activities includes: Engineering Fabrication; Labor Hire; Civil Construction; House Construction; Asbestos Removal and Demolition; Industry Training; High Pressure water jet cutting; Mechanical repairs and machining. Dawsons is also heavily involved in the mining sector, operating in four states.

Business needs
Dawsons needed to upgrade their existing Windows Forms LAN human resources system to allow better and flexible access to the ever increasing data size as labor hire clients are demanding easy access to copies of tickets and licenses and etc. The company has some 30,000 applicants on file, but access to this data has been complex and limited with the current system to a degree that the staff constantly canvasses this pool to supply the labor hire clients.

So the company decided to replace the restricted email and VPN communication they have been using for this process with a flexible and stable access to the labor pool. The labor hire staff needs unlimited access to the labor pool, as clients call at any time of the day, any day of the week and the company’s 24/7 operation needs to be able to respond as such.

In addition, it was decided to use existing employee skills to develop the new application and to use the existing LAN version as the benchmark as it was found to be better than any off the shelf system evaluated.

The Solution
The challenge of the development team was to find a solution that would allow creating the application with the same useful and already familiar Windows user interface (UI) of the local version, with the unlimited accessibility of a web based application.

The team searched for possible solutions that would allow utilizing as much of the LAN version’s existing Windows Forms code as possible. After some research, Visual WebGui was discovered and found to be highly regarded in many frameworks comparisons. On the strength of the comparisons, the team decided to give Visual WebGui a try. It didn’t take long for them to recognize that the Visual WebGui controls appear and react over the web the same as desktop controls. This and the fact that most of the code was directly ported which saved Dawsons hundreds of development hours are what make Visual WebGui so unique and productive.

“My first impression of Visual WebGui was perhaps disbelief. Not being a seasoned Web programmer, I initially found it hard to accept so much functionality from a web based application. Also, the speed is exceptional” said John Sainsbury, Financial Controller of the Dawsons Group who added “Since working with Visual WebGui, I have showcased parts of the application to our major clients, some of whom use SAP portals, and they are amazed.”

Benefits
Visual WebGui allowed the Dawsons team to accomplish their ultimate goal of allowing access to their human resources system from any web browser while maintaining the same capabilities and proven UI. As a result, the labor hire staff can do their job much more effectively and the weekly ritual of updating the LAN installations has vanished.

“The amazing part is that it was all completed by only one, not fully dedicated, developer and no learning curve for new web technologies.” John Sainsbury, Financial Controller of the Dawsons Group.

In addition, the enhanced system can be deployed on more platforms than the old one and the team is looking at extending access via Windows 8 tablets when those are released. Application performance is also tested to be much faster than any comparable system.

The result was so satisfying that the company is now looking to produce a mobile version for accessing the labor pool on the go. “By removing the barriers of the local network, Visual WebGui has changed how we can do business” said Lloyd Everist, General Manager Dawsons Group.

Screenshots
Accounts payable query

In this screen we see an invoice with a job number of a job we are about to bill in accounts receivable. By selecting the invoice in the grid, and clicking a button on that form, a second window opens with the costing details for that job. Grids in the different groups have different alternating color schemes.

Labor pool query and drill down

This screen allows to perform queries and filtering from over 30,000 applicants. The subset of data can then be analyzed.

Estimations

Estimates are created with a two tier structure, or "work breakdown structure" as it is commonly called. Most of the estimates are for steel, so we need to know tonnes and square meters. The stock master has the ability to store the square metres per metre, and tonnes per metre. Therefore, by doing a material take-off we automatically know the tonnes for transport, and the square metres for painting or galvanizing.