I had spent almost two years building a client relationship and visiting the business to gather requirements every 2-3 weeks. I would present the new updates to the system, gather additional requirements, and provide video tutorials showing how to use the system.
The ULM System was created with bootstrap, HTML5, PHP, SQL PDO, and Javascript. I designed the screens to look like a Windows 8 dashboard to make it easier for the users. I used a dark flat style with bright colors to contrast as inspiration for designing the UI. All of the screens, functionality, and database work was built from scratch.
You never truely understand the work to build an application until you get in there and put in the long hours to build it. When you build something entirely yourself then you would understand that it's truely a labor of love.
When I started the project I had to work with an old access application and reverse engineer the data structures and draw a map how the data connected together. I ported the data over into a SQL database and rebuilt a lot of the data. I started building screens such as the deal screen really trying to deliver something functional early on. The first iteration was simply creating a deal, adding products to the deal, and updating the deal.
The UI went through several iterations as I gathered feedback from it's users. I wanted to make the final version have the best user experience. The order screen would be for the employees to take orders from customers. I also create a screen for adding new products and new stores (customers). I created some additional applications such as when a customer calls they need to map from one deal with certain rules to another deal. This would adjust the totals that would be reflected in their order.
The project did have it's challenges which taught me some great lessons such as preparing an archive plan for 5 years of data. These problems are not apparent early on in a project and usually take thinking about the big picture to be able to identify these potential needs for an application. It was the most complete project I have finished myself and I even had a follow up project called the BA System which was similar to this application with it's unique challenges as well.