Scottish Elises

I have just managed to wangle my way off the phones for at least a week maybe more! Basically one of our jobs is to check what redemption deal you're on and advise what bills to send in, how much you'll get back and so on. At the moment this takes upwards of 6-10 minutes to even find let alone explain. So I complained about it to my manager adding I could fix it if given enough time.... So he called my bluff and I'm fixing it!

So far I have an excel spreadsheet that looks it all up for you and takes about 30 secs to use, that's assuming you can't hold two 5 digit numbers in your head (They should be able to do this, there is plenty of room in there!) and have to copy and paste.

I had a rough and ready version up and running in about 2 hours and a workable version in a day, my team manager then said, I'll go get Sarah to check this out....

Unbeknown to me, Sarah is in charge of the whole call centre and was mightily impressed! So I now have to gather the rest of the info (4-6 mins per deal, possibly upwards of 6000 deals...!) and get it field tested....

Better then answering the phones! Plus apparently I can get a cash reward for it too! Money for old rope

Also Sarah wanted to know why I was answering the phones and not a manager yet... Not bad for a probationer (Until Monday!)

LOL. These places are just cobbled together with lash up solutions like that rather than properly integrated systems - sooner or later there will be twenty versions of the spreadsheet with different hacks for different situations.

Scare them with the above, tell them they need a wee IT system - say a little Java program that uses JDBC to connect to some databases, etc., etc. Will take about 2 days to knock up and then you have a job for life, because there will always be more and more requirements!



Cheers,
Robin

Good one Rich.

Surely due a company 924 for your troubles?

robin wrote:Scare them with the above, tell them they need a wee IT system - say a little Java program that uses JDBC to connect to some databases, etc., etc. Will take about 2 days to knock up and then you have a job for life, because there will always be more and more requirements!

I'd have to learn Java and JDBC first before that!

My spreadsheet it simple enough, but it is passworded and also generates a code to put in the notes system which will tell you what version your using, it even grasses on you (In code) when you have fecked it up.

They are working on an integrated system but like the last one they produced it only covered some of the areas required meaning the old systems are never actually redundant

Useless.

How hard is Java to learn?

bertieduff wrote:Surely due a company 924 for your troubles?

A nice rust free one, in need of tidying? TBH they are talking £500 or so so that would just about cover it....

RICHARDHUMBLE wrote:
Useless.

How hard is Java to learn?

I assume POP is the correct acronym in internet speak ...

Cheers,
Robin

Sweet as a nut mate. Nice one...

I seem to find that I'm also cobbling spreadsheets together for the business my wife works for at the moment (Jewellery Sales). She started as a consultant about 2yrs ago and it was a paper company, so you had to post orders... fax/scan at best.

She's a manager now and wasn't happy about the paper stuff... but has no skills... So, they are now able to email soft copy orders in which also removes any 'consultant calculation errors' for invoicing.

The difference is.. I get nothing for it (apart from keeping my loving wife happy). £500 would be better though

Andy...

robin wrote:

RICHARDHUMBLE wrote:
Useless.

How hard is Java to learn?

I assume POP is the correct acronym in internet speak ...

Cheers,
Robin

Anyone point me in the right direction to start me off? Free Java idiots guide perhaps?

I would Google it but as I have no idea about Java I would have no idea of the quality of what I'd find.

Ta
Rich

http://java.sun.com/ would be a good starting place I would imagine, you can get NetBeans (Sun's Java IDE) on there and there seem to be a few tutorials to cover the basics also

Jamie (wannabe Java convert)

sounds like a nice wee solution to a problem you spotted there.

re application development, i would start at database level if i were you, chuck some sample data into sqlserver or access from your spreadsheet and write an app to connect / select (using java if you want). Will give you far more flexibility IMO.

all the best
scott

Nice one Rich. Good to hear situations where a manager actually takes a small risk on anything and let you sit down and attempt a fix, you'd expect a reply such as "hmm no, that's not in the handbook". Sounds like it's paid of your him and you!

A bit depends on how much other programming you have done - in a way I was being a bit flippant - I would do it that way myself, but if you know any other programming languages, they all connect to databases pretty much the same way (basically SQL wrapped up in one way or another), so you wouldn't have to learn Java - you could even use excel plus it's programming language (some flavour of visual basic I think) to achieve pretty much the same thing, albeit tied to M$ nonsense.

However, I can recommend the "Java in a nutshell" book for the bulk of it and sun's online Java tutorials are pretty good too, though maybe not at right level for someone with zero programming experience. I think the nutshell book has been updated for the latest 1.5.0 release of Java (also known as Java 5).

Sun's online tutorial:

http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/

Well worth learning even if you don't do anything with it right now.

Cheers,
Robin

Anyone point me in the right direction to start me off? Free Java idiots guide perhaps?

Cool thanks guys. My programming is limited to a bit of PIC (!) a little cobol at uni and a little VB years ago. So zero would be a good place to start...

Problem I had with the database is that basically there are 2 codes, tariff and variation, the result is driven by the tariff and then modified by the variation, I couldn't do that on a database, but it's a POP (:thumbsup I'll get this webspeak one day!) in excel and I can program (?) excel all day without breaking a sweat.

I'll start on the excel code stuff. What it really needs is a link into the telnet driven systems we currently have. It's like the travel agent system, two way teletext which is as utterly sh!t as it sounds!

[salesman hat on]
Rich, if your manager is seriously interested in a fully integrated system, give me a shout. It's exactly the kind of thing my company do and we have a team (the one I'm in) with Telecoms expertise, so we know the subject area well.
[/salesman hat off]

If you don't want to delve into Java just yet, I'd recommend a wee MS Access app. As long as you don't need too many concurrent users and it's not going to hold more than around 4GB of data (I think it falls over beyond that), then it's a relatively simple solution when you reach the limitations of Excel.

A good Java book that was used on my MSc course was "Big Java" by Horsmann. It doesn't assume any programming knowledge. Once you get more advanced, you definitely need something else, but it's a good start for people with minimal programming experience.

Cheers,
D