Here is a partial list of those who use the OMNIS family of software solutions. Below this you will find some brief excerpts describing how WORD MASTER has helped companies of all sizes find solutions to their management and computer needs.



 = WORD MASTER Client
  A.C. Nielsen
  Laser Phase
     American Express
  Mental Health Clinics
  Ameritech      Mercury Communications
  Aon      MIT
    Arthur D. Little
  Scholl College of Podiatry

    Battelle      Monsanto

    Booz Allen & Hamilton
  Motorola
    Bristol Meyers Squibb
  National Science Foundation

    British Telecom     Northern Telecom

  Disney Studios     PacTel

    Dow Chemical     Polaroid

  FMC     Ross Systems

    Fokker Aerospace     Seagrams

  Harris Bank     Searle

    Harvard University     Sprint

    Hughes Aircraft     Syntex

    JP Morgan     Tandem Computers

    Martin Marietta     University of Michigan

    McKinsey & Co.     World Bank




Our extensive experience in designing and managing large, mission-critical OMNIS applications goes back to 1986 and has involved, among others, projects such as these :



Credit Approval System    In 1993, Harris Trust and Savings Bank, a mid-sized, $21 Billion regional bank headquartered in Chicago and owned by Toronto-based Bank of Montreal, needed to re-engineer and computerize its Credit Approval Process. With over 400 bankers and support personnel involved in Corporate, Private and Personal banking and with its large installed base of Macintosh and Windows based machines, Harris faced the challenge of developing and deploying a unified Credit Approval System that could meet the needs of the disparate departments of the bank while at the same time overcome the technological hurdle of a cross platform environment. Word Master, Inc., a Chicago-based consulting firm specializing in the Omnis family of products, which was already working with the bank's Systems Development Division on an Omnis-based Sales Management System, was asked to develop a proof-of-concept of a new Credit Approval System to meet this need.

Harris Bank had already chosen Omnis among a list of other products and packages in 1992 for development of its Sales Management System. Omnis was chosen at that time due to its cross platform capabilities, maturity of the product and the successful deployment of a single user sub-system, developed by Word Master for the Loan Accounting section of the bank. That system had been delivered on-time and on-budget and was developed on a Macintosh and subsequently deployed on a Windows 3.1 machine.

The Credit Approval process at that time was a mixture of manual processes, word processing documents, checklists and an underpowered system developed in FileMaker in use by one department. Management faced such problems as inconsistent information, lack of documentation and little ability to gather certain reliable, bank-wide, information. Working with specialists from each of the bank's departments in JAD (Joint Application Development) sessions, Word Master was able to rapidly develop a working prototype that proved that such a system could be developed and deployed in a timely and cost effective manner.

A full development effort began in the 3rd quarter of 1993 with two full time consultants on site, working with a member of the bank's Systems Development Division staff. Since the bank's Credit Approval Process was undergoing changes at the same time that the Credit Approval System was being developed, Omnis proved its flexibility repeatedly as changes needed to be made to the system with little or no advance warning. In addition, and after development was well under way, the decision was taken to switch the RDBMS housing the system's data from RdB to Sybase. The change was made seamlessly due to Omnis' Data Access Module technology, which primarily involved telling Omnis to communicate with Sybase instead of RdB. Omnis handled the rest. As the development effort expanded to include another consultant and two additional bank staff members, Omnis' Multi-Developer Version Control System became an invaluable aid in assisting the developers in the work on the different areas of the application simultaneously.

The Credit Approval System was rolled out to its initial base of 40 Bankers and Loan Administrators in the 2nd quarter of 1995 and had expanded to an installed base of over 200 users as of 4th quarter 1996 with a target of over 400 users by mid-1997. Benefits to the bank included elimination of manual classifications in the bank's credit department, greater accuracy of data, more consistent flow of information between departments and the ability for the bank's Management to get highly detailed information about aspects of the bank's portfolio.

Films TV Shows and Artist Credits   A major film and TV studio replaced a C++ application for recording information about Film & TV artists credits, as well as about the Films and TV Shows. With a Sybase back-end and primarily Apple Macintosh clients at the front end, the existing application had to be replaced with a reliable, robust front-end that was simple and intuitive to use. Where the original application had taken 2 man years to develop, the replacement was achieved, including prototyping, in 4 months. Extensive use was made of hypertext and hyperlinks between screens, enabling the users to move easily around the app, interrogating the database by a "double click". End-users can now easily get at the data without having to wait for MS Word reports previously generated by the MIS department. Significant changes were made to the sybase backend, much of it using the Omnis interface, for example replacing an 8-table view with 1 new table which joins to 2 others - a perfect example of Academic Normalization. Having modded and replaced stored procedures, triggers etc, and reverse engineered the existing db so that it could be copied exactly, the conversion was done by building routines on a test db prior to doing the 'real thing'. This exercise took 5 days (almost every table had been changed and data re-mapped), but then the real database was rebuilt in 1 day due to this 'dummy run', allowing the roll out to happen over a weekend, with no down time.



Document Tracking System   Technical Advisors for team members and users to assist in the development of the functional requirements for a Document Tracking system for the same bank, as a child system to the Credit Approval System mentioned above.



Waste Disposal and Truck Routing Systems   Converted to Omnis 7 and continued to develop a multi-user database to maintain a customer list, billing and route information for a disposal and waste hauling firm. Advised the President and the General Manager of the firm to assist in further development and planning for additional integration of the system for future needs.



Executive Information System   Consulted to the MIS section of the executive offices of a large manufacturer and defense contractor to assist in the development of a system to analyze financial data for use by executive officers.



Sales Management System   Implemented all Omnis development for a Sales Management System for bankers to track bids made to customers, contacts at a customer, planning for future sales activity and capture of data for reporting purposes to the U.S. Government in compliance with the Community Reinvestment Act. Assisted in the conversion from RdB to Sybase for storage of data.



Tour Operations   Designed, developed and maintained a multi-user database to track client reservations invoicing, payments, Accounts Payable and Customer list, as well as to store price lists of various tour components with an interface to select from the components to calculate the price of a tour, for a medium-sized international travel wholesale firm.



Integrated Manufacturing and Accounting System   Consulted to the MIS department of a large telecommunications and electronics manufacturer to assist in the development of a system to analyze financial data for use by company managers.



Loan Accounting Sub-System   Planned, designed and developed a system for maintaining the security clearances and logon ID's of various computer systems within a large regional bank. The system (still in use today) was developed on a Macintosh and deployed on a Windows machine as a test case for Omnis cross platform development.



Product Tracking System   Converted to Omnis 7 and continued to develop and maintain a mission-critical application that allows programmers and developers to log and track errors, enhancements and work-in-progress for the systems development department of an international marketing research firm



Membership Tracking System   Converted to Omnis 7 and continued to develop a system to track and maintain the membership and dues payments for various national organizations for a medium-sized Management Consulting firm.



Network Marketing Application Maintained and continued development of a system to track orders and shipments for a network marketing organization.



Coupon Clipper Application   Maintained and continued to develop a system to input scanned data via a bar code interface for a manufacturer's cents-off coupon broker.



Mailing List Designed  Developed and maintained a Multi-user database of 15,000 names including importing information from outside sources, user-specified selection of data for creation of targeted mailings, etc.

 
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