Overview
Francis A. Bartlett founded The F. A. Bartlett Tree Expert Company in 1907 with a mission to provide preventive care that ensured the health, longevity, beauty, and safety of his clients’ trees. By 1927, the company’s growing focus on scientific research led to the creation of the Bartlett Tree Research Laboratories—originally based in North Stamford, Connecticut, and relocated in 1965 to a large property in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Business Objective
Bartlett wanted to update its antiquated application that was running on 10-year-old technologies. An important part of this effort was to streamline their processes by unifying data from more than 80 locations into one centralized database. The system needed to be easy to maintain, as each satellite office does not have computer support on site. In addition, the solution needed to be both highly intuitive and easy to use since the user base consists largely of novice Internet and PC users.
SharpHat Involvement
Bartlett turned to SharpHat, Inc. for help in developing an enterprise-level Intranet solution. The application automates many aspects of their business including customer information, automated proposal generation, work order creation & batch printing, employee information, timesheet information, and Google Maps integration. There are 400+ users of the application, located in over 200 offices across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Ireland. “Because of our large numbers of remote sales offices, we wanted to centralize the database to ease support issues, bringing the number of databases in the organization down, and centralize the application code to ease the burden of modifying the system to our ever changing needs,” said David Andry, [former] Bartlett VP- CIO. “The decentralized approach we have been using for the past 10 years has become a burden to our management team and its ever-evolving approach to arboriculture. The new office system achieves all of these goals perfectly.”
The Results
SharpHat, Inc. was responsible for all phases of the application, including defining a business process, requirements gathering, application design, design of a fully normalized, enterprise-wide Oracle database, application development, quality assurance, implementation and support. By following a strict software development methodology ingrained from years of real-world experience, the SharpHat team ensured a quality product that has been running Bartlett’s business for over 23 years.
Technologies
- C#
- VB.NET
- SignalR
- Oracle Database
- RESTful API
- MS 365 Integration (MS Graph)
- Google Maps Integration
- Crystal Reports
- SCSS
- Bootstrap
- JavaScript/jQuery
- Knockout
- HTML
- DHTML
- XSLT
