THE CHALLENGE
Over the past 40 years, the Aurum Group has grown to become one of Canada's leading suppliers for many facets of restorative and cosmetic dentistry with dental appliances being one of their most important products. In this aspect of their business, Aurum had been relying on software that was nearly 15 years old and operated specifically on the original Macintosh Power PC, leaving Aurum with little room to upgrade the software to meet procedural, technological and market changes.
Our challenge was to re-develop Aurum's software with new functionality and cross-platform capabilities in order to create a fundamental tool that would easily integrate into Aurum Ceramic's everyday business activities.
THE SOLUTION
Aurum's original software allowed users to save patient information to a central database in order to keep track of appliance designs. A single designer could then draw out an appliance plan, save this diagram, and print out a hard copy to send to a dentist for approval. Unfortunately, because this was such an outdated software piece, the database was limited to a small amount of records and had to be cleared every so often to make room for new patients.
In addition, during the process of completing the profile of a patient, the user would often have to switch between different pieces of software in order to accomplish a tasks specific to Aurum's methodology. This often created confusion and resulted in lost data. Finally, because the software was both old and obsolete and only ran on very old hardware, there was a very real danger in that it could be lost and millions of dollars of revenue lost along with it.
Through the technologies of Adobe Coldfusion MX, MYSQL, AJAX, Adobe Flash 8 and Flash Remoting MX, Media Dog produced a software solution that is far superior to what Aurum is currently utilizing. Within the framework of a web-based application, multiple designers are able to log in from any computer located on their intranet, regardless of the platform of the computer.
Once logged in, designers can view a large database of patients which is easily searchable and stored at a central location. No longer will Aurum be deleting existing records to make room for new patients, as the new MYSQL database has enough room for millions of patients. Within the system, the designer can also view patients and their information and also assign them to specific doctors, edit their appliance diagrams, and produce a web-ready PDFs on-the-fly, without ever leaving their browser.
The software also utilizes a role-based user management system which allows administrators to completely control which employees can use specific functionality - and because it is web based, they are no longer limited to only one designer using the system at a time.
Overall, this solution easily goes above and beyond what their existing software piece has done for them, all within one easy-to-use web based interface.
ABOUT MEDIA DOG
Media Dog Productions is a full service interactive Calgary web design agency that has been in business for almost 15 years. Experts in providing Calgary and all of North America with full service online solutions ranging from web design and development to custom ColdFusion applications to online and mobile marketing.
To learn more about Media Dog please visit our website at
www.mediadog.ca or
contact us.
