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In August 2001, Cascade Designs acquired a company called Mountain Safety Research or MSR. Both Cascade Designs and MSR had their own processes for managing consumer returns and internal quality assurance. Cascade Designs used a stand-alone Visual Basic 4 application originally developed 10 years ago with no connection to its J.D. Edwards One World ERP system. The application had minimal reporting options. MSR used a series of Excel spreadsheets, but again had no connection to the back-end J.D. Edwards system, and also had minimal reporting options. Neither existing system was capable of managing the combined needs of these two companies. Cascade Designs wanted to integrate the two organizations' systems, while improving functionality.
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Avanade proposed a solution based on Office XP and SQL Server that could handle the different tracking and shipping processes. Avanade designed the solution to use Excel as a front-end for data entry into the J.D. Edwards system. The new Excel interface guides users through the specific process of creating returns. Avanade also developed queries into the various systems and leveraged Smart Tags to allow management to access reports more easily than ever before. To connect data from the J.D. Edwards data systems and the SQL Server, Avanade built a customized Web Service.