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COSTBOSS
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The Client
Byzak Ltd is one of the UK’s leading providers of multi-discipline engineering and construction services to the public sector. With a workforce of approximately 300 the company undertakes work for clients including the Environment Agency, Scottish Power, Transco, United Utilities and Yorkshire Water.

The Solution
Kaleida designed and developed Costboss for Byzak. The solution is an extensive cost management system that manages all aspects of invoicing, payments, goods and tracking, consolidating data between several satellite sites.

Kaleida’s cost management system ensures accurate cost and profitability-related decisions in all aspects of Byzak’s work. The system was developed in Visual FoxPro and used as a standalone system at various satellite sites around the country. Costboss has been developed and enhanced over the years and is currently undergoing a conversion to a smart client solution, eCostboss, using .NET technologies.

Costboss Key Features + Benefits
Costboss was developed in 1999 for Byzak to provide Contract Cost Management functionality. It was developed to be a multi-user multi-database system: each site maintaining its own database and each database supporting multiple users. It was tightly integrated with the contact management system “Connections” also developed by Kaleida. The system supported the following features:

• Multiple Contracts: Costboss supports multiple contracts by allowing the user to select from a list of available local databases
• Supplier Management: Suppliers were selected from a list configured through “Connections”. There was also limited access to the connections database to allow minor modification of existing suppliers and addition of new suppliers
• Order Management: The system can be configured to work in parallel with a paper order system or paperless. Orders are entered into the system and the ordered items checked off against received item. Invoices were also managed and associated with delivery notes and orders. Each item of order, delivery note or invoice could be coded to provide a breakdown according to Product Codes, Transaction Codes and Work Areas
• Reporting: A flexible reporting system allows the user to produce a variety of reports filtered and grouped by suppliers and codes.

eCostboss Key Features + Benefits
eCostBoss is an enhanced migration of the existing Visual FoxPro Costboss system to .NET. It uses a central SQL Server 2000 database and a Smart Client front end developed in C#. eCostBoss has three constituent parts:

• Employee Administration System: This system provides management of core information relating to Byzak Employees both salaried and waged. This system allows Byzak to manage their employees and how each employee’s time and subsequently costs should be allocated across contracts. The system allows the user to manage the actual costs and the distribution of those costs on either a weekly or monthly basis
• ECostBoss: This is almost a direct migration of the existing Costboss system providing enhanced functionality in the main areas of the system with the main benefit being that users are allowed access to all contracts from one interface and database
• Sempi Timesheets: Sempi is a timesheet management system for the Electro Mechanical arm of Byzak Ltd. Employees can be configured with job titles and charge out rates. Contract management was implemented allowing Byzak Contracts to be associated with Sempi Contracts and the costs to be automatically updated between systems.