Success Stories: Programming

Regency Tafe

Regency Institute of TAFE is one of South Australia’s largest and fastest growing providers of vocational education in South Australia with a sound international reputation. Regency’s global network of business partners, sister colleges and learning centres make Regency a truly international institution, attracting over 6,000 students from over 35 countries each year in Hospitality.

Offering many of it's courses via correspondence (where students receive courseware and attend the campus only to complete exams) provided a unique challenge for the staff in the School of Plumbing.  A previous written database system was no longer meeting the needs of this growing area of their business.

Computer Image was contracted to replace the system, with a system that coped with their current requirements and was able to adapt to suite new requirements of competency based training.  A Visual Basic 6 user interface was written, with data held in a Microsoft SQL Server database.  Due to the limited number of end users MSDE 2000 (the lightweight version of SQL Server) was deployed to a user workstation.

A common Microsoft Outlook interface was given to the application to reduce user training and improve acceptance of the new system.

St Andrew's Primary School

St Andrew’s School is an independent co-educational Anglican primary school with an established tradition of providing a sound and liberal, Christian education in a caring family environment.  The School teaches both the Primary Years Programme and the Middle Years Programme of the International Baccalaureate, giving students a balanced outlook by relating the curriculum to the real world

The Student Reporting system was written to reduce the manual effort required to prepare end-of-term school assessments.  To maintain St Andrew's high standards a particularly formatted Microsoft Word Document Template was used to prepare the final output from the system.  It now takes mere hours to prepare over 200 student reports, instead of the normal number of weeks.

To further enhance the system student data is imported from their current financial management package.  This student data plus subject information is then used to create Microsoft Word documents that are used for electronic data entry of student results by the teachers.  This ensures the best quality data is received and reduces the number of checks required.

Again an Outlook style Windows application written in Visual Basic 6 ensured that little training of the user interface was required.

Bridgestone TG Australia

Established in 1939 as South Australian Rubber Mills Pty. Ltd., Bridgestone T.G. Australia Pty. Ltd. has over 60 years experience in product design, development and manufacture of automotive components to Australian and world markets.

Computer Image was contracted to re-develop an old GWBasic program in Visual Basic 6 to provide a a graphical user interface to control a robotic steering wheel measuring device.  This program runs under current versions of operating systems and has been enhanced to improve accuracy and allow for various new models of steering wheels to be added without the need to edit the source code, as was required previously.

Toop&Toop Real Estate

Toop&Toop is now recognised nationally as a market leader in residential real estate in Australia. Into the new century, the company continues to develop strongly with a focus on using advanced technology to constantly deliver new services and products to enhance the effectiveness of the sales process.

With all listed properties available for viewing on the Internet, Computer Image had the challenge of developing a custom written program with workflow built in, to allow the storage of photographs in different formats and resolutions.  This program allows users to select photos taken from a digital camera to be used for web publishing, printing and advertising.  High and low-resolution images are automatically generated and copied to strategic drop box locations to allow different departments to use images for various tasks.  Naming standards for images were implemented and incorporated into the software to ensure images are filed correctly, and can be added to without the fear of overwriting existing images.