Customer Success - Precision.BI

Precision.BI Enhances its ROI by Creating Consistent User Interfaces in NetAdvantage® for .NET

Pennsylvania-based Precision.BI provides a business and clinical intelligence solution for health care providers. Their product takes all of the information gathered by the medical industry — financials, clinical data, supply chains, contracts, etc. — and analyses it to provide meaningful information which users base important decisions upon. Their clients are innovative, information-oriented, leading-edge healthcare providers that use this critical component of business intelligence and information analysis to be competitive and successful. Healthcare providers that are serious about their reporting and analytical requirements and need to find ways to improve operations, better coordinate care, prevent medical errors, streamline workflows, expedite reimbursements, and implement their strategic plans more efficiently turn to Precision.BI. Precision.BI turned to Infragistics NetAdvantage for .NET to build the user interface on its business intelligence application.

The Situation

Precision.BI application in its legacy environment.

Several years ago, Precision.BI started using Infragistics' (formerly ProtoView's) COM control suite to develop its original product. ProtoView is one of the founding companies of Infragistics. So when the time came to move the entire system over to .NET, Precision.BI turned to Infragistics. "We had to have the same look and feel across all of our applications from COM to .NET to the Web-based application, and NetAdvantage allowed us to do just that," said Dan Reber, Lead Product Architect at Precision.BI. Healthcare institutions depend on Precision.BI to translate the thousands of megabytes of information it gathers into readable, usable reports. Using Infragistics NetAdvantage, Precision.BI has built an application that has a consistent look and feel across the entire product making it easy for even the most technically-challenged healthcare professional to use the product to obtain meaningful results.

Problems Solved

"Our application is huge with a great deal of different facets to it," said Reber. "Using NetAdvantage's AppStylist allowed me to create just one look and feel and then NetAdvantage made sure the entire application had the same font, colors and styles automatically. That made our general appearance consistent without a lot of time spent on designing and editing."

Precision.BI application in the NetAdvantage AppStylist environment.NetAdvantage AppStylist® empowers designers and developers to work together more efficiently in order to create desirable user interfaces for .NET applications. Developers can focus on styling those applications with a more designer-friendly tool outside of Visual Studio. Then the Application Styling Framework™ brings the efforts of both parties together with ease using one line of code in a Windows Forms application or via the "web config" file in ASP.NET applications.

Even though the differences between the way Windows Forms and ASP.NET applications are styled is immense, NetAdvantage AppStylist reduces that difference and complexity by providing two tools — NetAdvantage AppStylist for Windows Forms (a.k.a., the WinAppStylist) and NetAdvantage AppStylist for ASP.NET (a.k.a., the WebAppStylist). These tools use similar metaphors that allow visual designers to focus less on the idiosynchrasies of each UI platform and more on their creative process and design work.

Another challenge Precision.BI faced was that they needed to create a Web-based application having the same exact look and feel as their client/server-based product because so many doctors and healthcare professionals do not work on-site at the hospitals that house their application. Still, they needed to access the information from Precision.BI via the Web in the same way they would if they were sitting in an office at the hospital. Making the Web-based application look and feel the same as the client/server-based product was made simple with NetAdvantage. According to Reber, Precision.BI had replaced a majority of the native .NET controls with NetAdvantage, and found extending the data analysis software to the Web with the same user interface was simple. "I'm using all of NetAdvantage right now — Toolbar manager with Ribbon controls and Web toolbar, tabbed MDI Manager (for multiple dashboards), Docking Manager, Explorer Bar (for toolbox), Win and Web grids, Win and Web tree view and tabs and numerous other editor controls and containers — and it has made our development time so much faster."

Benefits

NetAdvantage is a good product that has helped me out tramendously. I would not have been able to achieve what I have without Infragistics NetAdvantage.

Developing an application as complex as Precision.BI was no easy task, but using NetAdvantage did make it much simpler. Reber especially liked that he was able to create a "ribbon" in his client/server application, and then was able to quickly and easily create the same look and feel in the ribbon on his Web-based application. "I would have never been able to do that on my own," he said.

"Without NetAdvantage that development elemenet would have been prohibitive to us. I would have had to hire two programmers and waste hundreds of man-hours to complete the project." Infragistics had made Precision.BI's development much faster and allowed them to deliver their product to the marketplace more quickly.

Reber attested to how this extended his company's ROI, "NetAdvantage is a good product that has helped me out tremendously. I would not have been able to achieve what I have without Infragistics NetAdvantage."

 

About NetAdvantageApplication Styling with Infragistics.

Infragistics has been the market leader in the presentation layer components industry for over 18 years. With a comprehensive portfolio of multi-platform Enterprise Software products and services, Infragistics has achieved global reach in nearly every Fortune 2000 company. Infragistics empowers developers to build and style great application user interfaces for Windows Forms, ASP.NET, and WPF, and additionally offers user interface test tools, support, training and consulting services.

NetAdvantage products can be purchased in individual platform-specific suites, or grouped in platform combinations. Any NetAdvantage product suite purchase includes full source code to the purchased components and frameworks, world-class developer support around-the-clock, and updates and upgrades for one year on a guaranteed release cycle. Priority support via phone, 24-hr. chat and E-Mail is also available.

For more information about Infragistics NetAdvantage and the controls described in this success story please visit:
http://www.infragistics.com/dotnet/netadvantage.aspx

For more information on the Application Styling Framework, NetAdvantage AppStylist and Style Libraries please visit:
http://www.infragistics.com/dotnet/netadvantage/appstylist.aspx