I have an idea that would help our Sales and Marketing company add value to many of our retail clients via a software application. Our main IT and software consultants are neck deep in a major project that will roll out by the end of 2009 so their bandwidth to take on another project is nill. My work flow allows me to divest on side projects so, while I have no software/programming background, Im looking to advance the idea as fas as I can from the concept phase until their bandwidth opens up.

Not knowing what I dont know Ill give my vision and a list of of what I would like the application to do.

The main purpose of the project is to quantitate trends in a specific retail circular (weekly/sunday circular). My vision is to scan a retail ad (or take an electronic ad from a retailer) and quantitate the ad by isolating specific features from the products, layout, promotions, etc. After talking to our clients, this is something almost all of them would want, that we feel no one is capable of providing, so the demand and opportunity is there.

How I think it would work:
1) Have a retail ad on the computer screen
2) Take my cursor, click and drag over a product with a rectangle.
3) When I release my cursor, the rectangle image would save to a server, while also saving the length and width of the image as a data entry
4) Simultaneously when I release the cursor, a menu would pop up where I could enter other key features of the entry (Retailer, Page #, product category, manufacturer, SKU, price, etc)
5) I would click "Save" and the image along with the data from #4 would save as 1 entry that I could recall later (assuming via SQL).
6) I would go through the entire retail ad, isolating every product, promotion, advertisement that is present, saving potentially hundreds of entries for one "book" for the circular. Essentially we would be treating the ad as real estate and would be surveying every inch of it.
7) Once the data is stored we would like to connect data points from a multiple circulars and get averages, trends, etc. The vision is to have a dashboard for our clients to view the trends. I imagine a lot of this would need to be manual, especially if we were wanting to put together a summary with the images. Im acquainted with SQL so I imagine we could have a set of commands to pull specific data out based on the trends we think our clients need to see. Lets say we want to show our client the average selling price of a product category over a 3 month period. I would like to predefine this fetch command where the user just clicks "Avg Selling Price", select a date range, and the data would be received in excel where we could summarize.
8) Stretch goal is to have a dashboard where as we enter the data, our client could login and see the trends real time by manipulating pull downs and radio buttons, click, and a report is generated.


My questions to the Techies on TWW:
1) Based on what we want the project to do, what software coding skills would be core requirements?
2) What would you estimate this project would require in time and $. I understand the more $, the quicker but more of a man hours to complete is what Im looking for.
3) If we needed to go external to begin the project, any references for firms this community is aware of?
4) Any other thoughts, suggestions, comments - just be easy, I know I am not a SME here. Im completely open to being educated here on the technology, the project management of this, or ideas to help get this out of the conceptual phase.

[Edited on June 13, 2009 at 10:53 PM. Reason : .]

6/13/2009 10:49:29 PM

lol

6/13/2009 10:54:57 PM

ibtnoen


also, i suggest you use the latest microsoft project to do this and windows vista

[Edited on June 13, 2009 at 10:59 PM. Reason : .]

6/13/2009 10:55:16 PM

sorry dude, i'm not really getting your vision here. i guess i understand the steps you outlined, i just don't see what's valuable about that. what business are you in?

as for the technical stuff, it doesn't sound like a lot, in cases like this, you don't really know what you want until you see it built. to really get a good sense of what it will take to get this project accomplished, you need to have a more in depth conversation with somebody.

i see you're in charlotte - i'm a software developer in charlotte so if you're serious about doing this (and have the funding), PM me and either i could do it for you or refer you to somebody locally

6/13/2009 11:15:29 PM

Quote :

"sorry dude, i'm not really getting your vision here. i guess i understand the steps you outlined, i just don't see what's valuable about that."

6/13/2009 11:17:22 PM

Quote :

"sorry dude, i'm not really getting your vision here. i guess i understand the steps you outlined, i just don't see what's valuable about that."

6/13/2009 11:17:22 PM

Quote :

"sorry dude, i'm not really getting your vision here. i guess i understand the steps you outlined, i just don't see what's valuable about that."

6/13/2009 11:17:22 PM

Quote :

"sorry dude, i'm not really getting your vision here. i guess i understand the steps you outlined, i just don't see what's valuable about that."

6/13/2009 11:17:22 PM

Quote :

"sorry dude, i'm not really getting your vision here. i guess i understand the steps you outlined, i just don't see what's valuable about that."

6/13/2009 11:17:22 PM

Quote :

"sorry dude, i'm not really getting your vision here. i guess i understand the steps you outlined, i just don't see what's valuable about that."

6/13/2009 11:17:22 PM

Thanks for BTTT. Received several PM's, thanks so far.

6/13/2009 11:33:35 PM

Im assuming .Net , PHP, MySQL for starters?

6/14/2009 12:35:21 AM

you're probably going to want to check out the hot new Apache/Unlambda/CSV stack, it's all the rage

6/14/2009 12:47:09 AM

Quote :

"My work flow allows me to divest on side projects"

Are we even allowed to use that word here?

1) Moderate to expert programming skills in any language, the important thing is find a programmer that's interested and feels capable of accomplishing it. The language used is largely irrelevant if you have someone competent.

2) Project cost depends entirely on the programmer and/or company you hire, your scope is too loosely defined and hashed out for a serious cost analysis.

3) Sorry, I have no current references.

4) Really the biggest thought is as I said before, find a programmer that either (a) wants money and is willing to do any work regardless of personal interest, or (b) do exactly as you're doing now and shop around for interest. You REALLY want to make sure that you find a programmer who is willing to provide you attention. Do not just hire someone because they are cheap, it generally means they are overworked and can't give your job enough attention. Programming an effective application with a solid and usable interface costs money, skimping on that makes your life as a user very difficult.

Good luck!

6/14/2009 12:57:07 AM

I can see the value of this.

Not a terrible complicated project actually. Most contract software companies should be able to ship this out for a reasonable amount.

Your #7 is where the real cost is. If you leave out #7, then you are probably looking at <$8,000 for the project. Data visualization and trending is where the money comes in. There are a number of options in PHP for charting and visualization, which, combined with a rich MySQL database should give you a lot of flexibility.

You could also use Excel + ODBC to a database to allow for slightly easier data manipulation, or actually have an Excel Add-In created for your service.

With #7, I'd throw out a ballpark of $10-15k for a well produced application.

6/14/2009 5:58:20 AM

stretch goal

fucking shoot me before I have to learn any more corporate jargon

6/14/2009 7:17:16 AM

Five bucks says this guy took a Six Sigma course.

6/14/2009 7:42:17 AM

Quote :

"Five bucks says this guy took a Six Sigma course."

Or my first boss was a master black belt so I suppose I think that way sometimes. And its tech talk, divest should be allowed!

Noen - Thanks for the feedback and pricing estimate. I was googled PHP Charting/Graphing and saw some some nice sites http://pchart.sourceforge.net/ and http://www.phpcharting.com/

So far as the actual application, isnt web based the way to go?

gs7 - Thank you as well. Great point on choosing a dedicated developer.

Quote :

"Programming an effective application with a solid and usable interface costs money, skimping on that makes your life as a user very difficult."

Great point. Im pretty picky about design, asthetics, etc since our clients would be using this data to incorporate into their sales/market share data. Great point again.

6/14/2009 2:43:53 PM

sas has a product that does this already. you should send them our way and have them ask about CXA (customer experience analytics)

6/14/2009 2:46:47 PM

Quote :

"So far as the actual application, isnt web based the way to go?"

Probably not. It looks like you'd be better off with a two tiered app. A client application for capture and input that feeds to a web service for data analysis.

And I'd look for contract development *companies* before you start looking at just hiring a developer. Hiring an individual developer means you have no design, test or management. You may be able to provide the management, but design and test are both critical aspects, and one person should not be doing all three.

6/14/2009 2:49:36 PM

Quote :

"fucking shoot me before I have to learn any more corporate jargon"

Quote :

"Five bucks says this guy took a Six Sigma course."

my thoughts exactly. let's count the management bullshit speak in the first paragraph:

Quote :

"I have an idea that would help our Sales and Marketing company add value to many of our retail clients via a software application. Our main IT and software consultants are neck deep in a major project that will roll out by the end of 2009 so their bandwidth to take on another project is nill. My work flow allows me to divest on side projects so, while I have no software/programming background, Im looking to advance the idea as fas as I can from the concept phase until their bandwidth opens up."

6/14/2009 2:54:03 PM

^
I found the cause: Sales and Marketing company

6/14/2009 3:02:10 PM

^ lol, should I have said "Yo yo yo homies, need to make an app, something better than one of those Iphone apps, dont worry what its for, just tell me how much texa$ and how long. Kthxbye.

6/14/2009 3:02:44 PM

oh shit, you're right. I glossed right over that - i took it as our S&M department.

wow..... that would be fucking terrible to be surrounded by only Sales/Marketing people all day, every day.

6/14/2009 3:04:00 PM

Quote :

"wow..... that would be fucking terrible to be surrounded by only Sales/Marketing people all day, every day."

I agree, glad thats not us.

smoothcrim - INteresting play on SaS having somthing like this. I remeber we discussed briefly back in Dec at Napper T's. Ill send you a PM. Preciate. (0,0,0,3!,3!)

6/14/2009 3:06:26 PM