Make your business succeed by taking control of data: how one company easily manages information using a simple database program - case study of Torque Travel owner Donald Douglass and how he manages information - Software Solutions - column

Home Office Computing, July, 1991 by Lisa Kleinholz

How One Company Easily

Manages Information

Using a Simple Database

Program

Five years ago, when he took a chance and started his own business booking rooms for drivers and their crews at auto-racing events, Donald Douglass knew he had a winning idea. But like many home-based entrepreneurs, he faced a formidable task: organizing a mammoth amount of information. As an added twist, the software he chose to accomplish this task had to be easy to set up and run, because Douglass had little computer know-how.

THE BUSINESS

As a driver and official on the International Motor Sports Association (IMSA) circuit, Douglass learned about the lodging problem firsthand. He was acutely aware of the chaos created by the scramble for the few decent rooms near major racetracks, especially in rural areas with little other tourism, like Sebring, Florida, and Watkins Glen in upstate New York.

"Travel was an awful mess," he explains. "So after a couple of years, I decided I'd try to make a business out of it by bringing some order to it."

He culled a list of small hotels and inns that most travel agencies didn't have the time to ferret out. The hotels were happy to give discounts on blocks of rooms if Douglass would handle the continual revisions that racing crews always seem to require. So he was able to give teams not only a wider choice of rooms closer to the tracks than general travel agencies but also lower prices.

Douglass arranged to hook into the airline computer system SABRE by modem, so he could book air travel and rental cars for his clients from his home office in rural western Massachusetts. He uses a correspondent travel agency in Florida to write the tickets. (The SABRE system signals the agency by computer when tickets need to be written.)

The fledging business, Torque Travel, Inc., took off in a flash. From a gross of about $50,000 in 1986, its first year, Torque topped $1 million last year.

DEVIDE AND CONQUER, THEN LINK

Torque Travel managed this rapid growth without collapsing under the strain because Douglass was able to juggle a lot of data, including races, hotels, teams, credit-card numbers, contacts, number and types of rooms booked, payments owed the hotels, and more, using two IBM-compatible 386 computers, a modem, a fax machine, and a database program called Professional File (Software Publishing Corp.).

He chose the software because it was easy to use. As he began to design his system for organizing data, he saw that he could keep the information manageable by breaking it down into small files, and then using the lookup function to share information among them. This function, common to many flat-file database programs, lets him look up and draw in data from one file while he's working within another.

Douglass quickly realized that he could reap four major benefits by using lookups:

1. He didn't need to go to a more complicated (and more expensive) relational database to link information.

2. He could sort, retrieve, and update more rapidly, since files could be smaller.

3. He could save time and increase accuracy by not having to retype the same information, such as names, addresses, and credit-card numbers.

4. He could use database forms to fill out customer invoices and fax covers at the touch of a key.

Taking advantage of these benefits, Douglass created a well-integrated group of nine separate files that share information and save him lots of typing and cross-checking time.

Although Torque Travel's database task involves matching hotel rooms with race teams, the general principle of dividing data on customers and inventory (or other information) into separate files then pulling some of that data into a third file for orders is one that can be applied to almost any business. Here's how Douglass tailored the divide-and-conquer-then-link concept to his individual needs.

LEVEL ONE: THE BASICS

Races. Douglass keeps track of all the year's races in one separate file. As soon as dates are set, he enters them here, along with information on track contacts and the types of cars included in the race: GTP, fancy prototype cars; GTO and GTU, which look like street cars but are pure race cars underneath; or Firehawk, which are slightly modified street cars.

Teams. In another file, he records companies and individual clients. Most date entries are drivers and their crews, but a few are media people, suppliers, and freelancers, like the guy who sells souvenirs. This is where Douglass keeps fax and phone numbers, addresses, and credit-card numbers for up to three contacts per company. He uses this file to send out mailings, informing teams of which hotels and special discounts are available for each race.

Hotels. In a third file, Douglass records each hotel he's scouted, with phone, fax, address, contacts, miles from track, number and type of rooms, average rates, comments on the quality of rooms and proximity of restaurants, and directions both to the hotel from the airport and to the track from the hotel.

LEVEL TWO: HANDLING ORDERS