Hi-JACk

HI-JACk v3

Hi-Image Job Activity
An intranet designed for the Graphic Design, Printing and Bulk Mailing industry. The application tracks the full lifecycle of jobs as they progress from the design phase, through printing and eventually mailing allowing for data capture from all departments along the way.

The intranet is accessed via browser. It is written in Classic ASP (VB Script) and HTML and uses an MS Access database. The app runs on any simple web server capable of handling those resources.

Jobs
Each piece of work that came through from customers is entered as a job. They have a status, due date and optional departments that the work will be going through: Graphic design (G), Printing (P), Mailing Data (M), Mailing Receipts (M2), Shipping (S), Invoicing ($). Selecting the job provides a printable summary.

Customers
Customers are the recipients of the work. They can be associated to Jobs and Mailing Permits. Browse customer lists to view or edit. Customer summaries provided easy access to specific jobs.

Projects
In instances where the same design is used across multiple clients, or a client has multiple jobs with different versions, for example, jobs can be grouped into Projects. This allows another easy way to organize and find jobs in the system.

Progress

Aside from the main job’s status, each department had the ability to mark approvals and “complete” their section. This allowed us to view progress at a glance. Also, after a job was completed, then the invoicing section would show up, with its own status as well. These icons were also the links to view and edit the details for that department.

Mailing Permits
Most clients sending bulk mail have their own mailing permits for which they can use an indicia on their mailings. For others, an in-house permit was available for a fee.

Calendar
Outside of normal due dates and dates when certain tasks were completed, the system also maintained a calendar for entries of different types. Jobs could be added to the calendar, for any date, for a list of tasks: Print, Mail, Fold, Cut, Ship, Pick-up. We referred to the independent calendar entries as the Production Schedule or Journal.

Browsing the calendar allowed a user to see jobs by all the important dates used in the system.

Search
The search ended up primarily being used for looking up job numbers, but it also performed a simple text search through all the comment and detail fields of all the main and sub-objects.

Edit Locking
We had a few instances where people were editing the same job and it created problems, so we implemented locking. If a user was on a “add” or “edit” page, they would lock the job with a timestamp that was good for some period of time. Any user could access it after the timestamp expired. We also gave them a button to unlock if they were finished.