Tool developed during software project course simplifies company data management

University of Tartu Institute of Computer Science bachelor’s students Smaragda Luchia Sarana, Tuudur Jürgen Utt, Armin Liiv and Karl Prink created a solution as part of the software project course that helps the institute’s industry collaboration team add company data to its customer relationship management system on the Notion platform more quickly and conveniently.

According to Morten Merila, Senior Specialist of Cooperation Development in the industry collaboration team, the team often attends events and conferences where they make new contacts they want to add to their customer relationship management system, or CRM. Until now, this has been a time-consuming task, as each new company had to be entered manually, including its registry code, name, address, email address, phone number and contact persons.

“When we attended an event and gained, for example, dozens of new contacts, it took a great deal of time to manually enter all the data we needed,” Merila said, describing the problem.

The students’ task was to create a solution that would automate retrieving information from the Estonian Business Register and adding it to Notion. The work began with clarifying the problem and mapping the needs of the industry collaboration team. The students then defined the requirements for the application, divided roles within the team and began development.

According to the students, communication with the industry collaboration team took place on average every two to three weeks. During the meetings, the students demonstrated completed developments, asked for feedback and refined the direction of the solution. Merila said cooperation with the students was very pleasant. “The students were competent, communication worked well, and they asked for a lot of feedback,” he said.

During the project, the two sides jointly discussed the possibilities and limitations of different features. The initial idea of automatically updating existing contacts developed into a more manual solution that better suited the team’s actual workflow. According to Merila, the students explored the topic in depth and were later very helpful in implementing the solution, providing instructions on how it works and how to resolve possible errors.

The final result was a tool that meets the industry collaboration team’s initial needs and helps make adding contacts to the customer relationship management system smoother. “The most important thing is that, with minimal input from our side, we received a functional tool that would otherwise have required a great deal of our team’s resources,” Merila said.

The students said the course gave them a good opportunity to work on a practical problem. “What we are most pleased about is that the solution did not simply end up sitting in a drawer, but is genuinely useful in practice and makes users’ everyday work significantly smoother,” the students said, describing their course project experience.

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