Key Technologies:

• .NET Front End Framework
• Microsoft SQL Database  Backend
• Bespoke Software Development

The Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office Sydney is the official administrative office of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government (HKSARG) for Australia and New Zealand. Along with 16 other branches worldwide, HKETOs are responsible for Hong Kong’s economic interests in their respective regions.

Event Management

Each year, HKETO Sydney hosts various events that invite selected people from a list containing over 6000 contacts. To streamline this process, Apek developed a bespoke software application that helps HKETO Sydney efficiently sort and group contacts based on occupation and industrial attributes. The application runs a .NET frontend client with a Microsoft SQL Server backend database to meet the demanding needs of a government branch office.

Contact Update Website

HKETO Sydney staff perform a contact detail update activity each year which involves sending and sorting over 6000 letters to their contacts. Updated details are then manually updated by staff through Apek’s event management program. This was inefficient and costly as they were hiring temporary staff for weeks to carry out this task.

The Solution

To greatly improve the efficiency of manually updating details, HKETO Sydney commissioned a complementary website that allows contacts to update their details and electronically send updated details through. A custom software algorithm was also developed to ensure that details sent by contacts conformed to formatting standards. The website was hosted using Microsoft IIS with SSL encryption and used Microsoft SQL Server 2008 for enterprise-grade security.

Conclusion

The website improved the efficiency of the contact update activity by significantly reducing the paper contact updates as well as manual entry of updated contact details. This helped reduce staff costs and improved data quality. While paper contact updating was still offered as an alternative, the website received over 80% of the submitted updates which has vastly improved the speed and efficiency of handling the updated details.