services wanted Help please - I don't have a clue what I'm doing!

[Charlie Kilo]

I am after your help, apologies for the oncoming incoherent waffle.

I know little to nothing about Filemaker but I know enough that it could be the solution to a challenge my company is currently facing. I know so little I don't even know if I have posted this in the relevant section!

I am trying to find out if my challenge is solvable with Filemaker and if so how complex would it be and what I should be looking to pay someone to do it. I know people might not want to answer in definitive terms what I should expect to pay, but a ball park figure of hours and an average hourly/daily rate would be more than adequate to help me budget.

My challenge is this;

My company provides a number of different engineering and compliance services to my clients, each client having it own unique blend of services. Each service is viewed as its own department within my company and with its own team and account mangers managing the delivery and reporting.

Currently each department emails current project status reports and market data/reports monthly to their own accounts. This is diluting our company brand as there is no common formatting etc. Also each client could potential be receiving 6-7 different emails monthly from my company from different departments updating them on the different stages of essentially the same "project". It is a messy, incoherent process and one that we need to sort out.

We would like to have one document that goes out to each client monthly. The document should contain generic market information but also specific information unique to that client. We could get someone to sit down and manually cut/copy/paste/format each document but that is not cost effective. I would imagine each department uploads the relevant client spread sheets, graphs text etc in a uniformed fashion to a database of sorts. Then from this information a "newsletter" containing everything usually sent out over 6 emails could be consolidated into one succinct well branded message. Either that or there is a web portal that could provide clients with their own "dashboard" of current project results etc.

What I am after is.

- Is this possible in Filemaker, or would another program be more suited?

- How complex/difficult would this be

-How long could a project like this take. A very rough ball park figure would do. Just so we know if now is the right time to start approaching developers for full quotes or not.

- Roughly what is the average day/hour/project rate for developers. Again so we know if we would be wasting everyone's time by meeting with someone.

I hope that all makes sense? If not, I apologise, please just ask for more clarity on a specific area and I'll try to provide it.

Cheers

[comment]

The devil is in the details. For example, linking a spreadsheet document to a record (or storing the document itself in a record) is relatively easy. Getting the data from the spreadsheet into the database is more complex - and nearly impossible if the spreadsheets do not follow a consistent format.

As for using Filemaker or not: IMHO, if your data is collected and organized outside of Filemaker and the main purpose is to re-package it for another non-Filemaker user, there is very little (if any) advantage in using Filemaker.

OTOH, if you could get your departments to use Filemaker in the first place, your developments costs would be very likely significantly lower than any other platform.

[David McQueen]

The devil is in the details. For example, linking a spreadsheet document to a record (or storing the document itself in a record) is relatively easy. Getting the data from the spreadsheet into the database is more complex - and nearly impossible if the spreadsheets do not follow a consistent format.

As for using Filemaker or not: IMHO, if your data is collected and organized outside of Filemaker and the main purpose is to re-package it for another non-Filemaker user, there is very little (if any) advantage in using Filemaker.

OTOH, if you could get your departments to use Filemaker in the first place, your developments costs would be very likely significantly lower than any other platform.

I would second that.

Further, part of the brand dilution is the independence of the various departments. The difference in reporting formats etc goes far beyond the emails sent out to clients. It starts right at the department floor and is reflected in their individual work methods.

It tells me either there should be a full narrative report coming from each department, it being implied that each department is specialized enough that the reports should be different, each covering specialized items, or your company lacks a "Guardian of the Spec" in terms of setting work methodologies and following through to reporting requirements to clients to insure a company consistency.

FileMaker does a lot of things and does them pretty well. However, it works best when things are internalized within one system for the most part.

Just my $.02 CDN