What We Did for Scott Return   About Scott Scott is the director of operations for a company providing therapy to autistic children. He had already designed a clinic management database for his company that was functioning well. What Scott had not automated was the work flow scheduling of his staff members and patients. This is a complex procedure that requires times to be kept for a whole series of activities and conflicts between staff and patient activities to be avoided. This function was taking two or three people per centre to accomplish by hand. What was done A program was designed that: Allowed the scheduling of staff and patient activities for any day. Automatically determined conflicts prior to committing the appointments. Allowed the reallocation of staff resources without having to reschedule individual appointments. Allowed viewing the resultant schedule either by selected staff member or by selected client per day (To Do List), week or month (Calendar view). Provided a day guide for each centre that allowed the supervisor to know where everyone was over the day. Allowed block scheduling using an existing schedule as a model. Allowed rescheduling with full conflict detection in place, removing the fear of introducing conflicts into the schedule. Allowed all of this to be done over a WAN so that the East Coast, West Coast and Mid West centres could all use the program. Provided reporting as required. Gave individual users express permissions for security purposes. The Result The scheduling function is now handled by one person per office and the results are available to all. It is quicker, neater and more accurate than the old method. Followup Last I checked there were over 100,000 events scheduled in this program. There have been features added from time to time as the nature of the business has changed. Return