CPO Approval Application

Cypress Administrative Services
White Plains, NY USA

The Capital Purchase Orders (CPO) Approval Application is a new Iron Speed Designer-based application used internally by Cypress Health Care Management employees, who include facility administrators and department heads, as well as the company president and the company administrative president.

Regional Vice President (RVP) approval screen.

Cypress Health Care manages assisted living and skilled nursing facilities throughout the United States. Building administrators for each facility must obtain approval for purchases exceeding $500.

The type of asset requested determines who must approve the request. For example, if the asset is a computer, the IT Vice President must review and approve the request before forwarding it to the Regional Vice President (RVP). The Cypress Health Care President is the final approval authority before the proposed item is purchased.

The CPO Approval Application expedites this process. Administrators can now submit requests directly to upper management, be it a department head or RVP, and track the request throughout the approval process, reviewing any comments attached to the submission.

Security

The approving managers' screens are secured using role-based security. They can comment, approve, or reject requests directly from their screen.

Budget Tracking

The CPO Approval Application is also used for budget tracking. At the end of each year, administrators at each location meet with an RVP to determine their annual budget. The budget for each building is clearly displayed on all application pages. Users can review the annual budget and track annual spending in real-time. The budget tracking feature quickly became an integral part of the application. Today, Cypress Health Care uses the feature to plan project spending in the coming year.

Administrator submission screen with budget calculator.

Application size and scope

The application uses one Microsoft SQL Server database, six tables, four views, and 28 Web pages. The largest table is the CPO Submit Table which contains several hundred records. This application is fairly new and we expect the number of records to grow substantially over time.

There are currently 25 application users processing between 25 and 50 transactions each month.

The project

I spent less than one hour building the Iron Speed Designer portion of this application. I spent another week and a half on development and two or three days on documentation. Using Iron Speed Designer allowed me to spend my time customizing the application. I can't imagine going back to doing it by hand!

Code extensions and customizations

The CPO Approval Application includes several code customizations comprising approximately 400 lines of custom code including:

	File upload
	Email notification
	Custom WHERE clauses

Page layout customizations

I used the standard Alps design theme in Iron Speed Designer.

Iron Speed Designer impact

Here at Cypress Health Care, we had long wanted to replace our manual email approval process with a .NET Web application. When we first started looking at Iron Speed Designer, we created a timeline for all our development projects, anticipating they would take a year. Iron Speed Designer helped us accomplish our goals in six months.

I would not have even attempted the project without this tool. Using Iron Speed Designer saved me more than one person-month of development time, and easily $10,000 in development costs! The ease and flexibility of implementing security, along with the basic database functionality, allow me to adapt to requests from application users quickly and efficiently.

In the past two years, I have built only one application by hand. We currently have 11 Iron Speed Designer applications running at Cypress Health Care that range from simple data input to contract management systems. Since I'm the only developer, the tool saves me a lot of time by creating professional-looking .NET Web applications, including pages that are 100 times better than anything I could create on my own.

Next steps

We plan to integrate several of our vendor applications with the CPO Approval Application. This will allow ordering from our system rather than via phone or email.

About the developer

Matthew began his career as a staff accountant and quickly realized he did not want to do this for the rest of his life. He started looking into IT, and was transferred to the IT staff as a Help Desk Technician. He moved up the ladder to Third Level Support before becoming interested in programming. He did a lot of QA work in the beginning and eventually got a taste of Java. He was most recently hired to do full-time development for Cypress Administrative Services.

Matthew holds a Bachelor's of Business Administration in Accounting.