Patsy Aiken Designs

Our company is called Patsy Aiken Designs (www.patsyaiken.com and www.chezami.com). We design, manufacture and market a line of children's apparel. I am co-owner along with my wife Patsy. Our cony is located in Raleigh, NC. We have been in business over 27 years, selling children's apparel. For the first 20 years, we sold wholesale to department stores and childrenswear boutiques nationwide. The past 7 years we have been selling not through stores, but retailing our product ourselves through a home-party direct selling program called "Chez Ami" ("at the home of a friend") and online.

We sell approximately $7,000,000 annually.

Prior to going into the apparel business, I was a career US Navy pilot and AEDO (Aeronautical engineering duty officer). During that time, I earned a Masters degree in Operations Research and Systems Analysis, where I built my computer programming foundation. When my wife and I formed our apparel business, my computer background led me to create software for our company's use, and I began using dBase ll in 1983, then switched to FoxBase... and followed the Fox to the current Visual FoxPro 9.0.

Along the way, I discovered Web Connect, and quickly jumped on Rick's bandwagon in the year 1999.

Since our company's sales force is hundreds of people spread all over the country, a web-based system seemed like a fabulous idea. We built our apparel system to accommodate the sales force so they could enter orders, mange their customer database, review their commissions, send email to their customers, use our message boards and do many other activities related to their job with us.

We also accommodate our customers with an informative website and an online shopping system. After becoming proficient with Web Connect, I decide to build all our company's computer operations to be web-based. When our staff of 30 come to work each day, they login to our company's website and conduct all their work on our WC system. Our manufacturing systems, payroll, time-clock, accounts payable, receivable, general ledger, inventory, work-in-process, order processing, customer relations, etc are all in this web-based system.

We also have a retail outlet store which is run by the same WC application. All sales, credit card transactions, inventory, etc goes through this system.

So, you can see, we have quite an extensive system. The hit-count accumulates rapidly when you consider even our own staff accounts for a large number of hits... sitting at the computer all day long managing customers, product, inventory,shipments, etc.

Our system links to several outside sources of information for things like credit card transaction, sales tax, UPS shipping charges, US Post Office address cleaning, and bank lockbox data.

My code is not very pretty, but it works great. I use both process-class programs and wcs script files as the backbone of my Web Connect application. We run our system on a dual processor server hosted by AppSite Hosting (previously called DellHost). We run 6 instances of our automation server.

We are very pleased with the reliability and dependability of Web Connect. Now that we are very comfortable with maintaining and end enhancing our system, we plan to stick with what works well!

I spend 95% of my time on this one application. I have a few smaller apps which I have done for others, but they are minor compared to my apparel app. My apparel app is used only by our company.

Joel Aiken
Patsy Aiken Designs