Case Study 1 - Customized web services

We did some work for a services company which maintained a database of contractors.
Every so often there would be some change to the pricing, services or contact details
of a contractor. Each change would take an average of 20 minutes to deal with. They
had about 6000 people in their database each changing something in their details every
3 months or so. Ie, maintaining this database was taking them 2000 hours a year, at a loaded
cost of roughly £30,000/yr. Now, we could have improved the interface to their database
with an intranet front end to half the time required. This would have cost them maybe £1500 and reduced
the cost of maintenance to £15,000/yr, ie it would have been a very worthwhile investment.
Instead we moved the whole process online, and provided login capabilities for the
subcontractors so they could update themselves. This cost them £2,800 and reduced their
maintenance cost to perhaps £3,000/yr with a side benefit of improving their relationship
with their contractors whose time it also saved.