Chapter 18: Project Case Study - Creating the Online Appraisal Application

This chapter discusses the case study of a fictitious automobile spare parts manufacturing company called Electric Components, Inc. The chapter also introduces the workings of Web services and components. ColdFusion MX is capable of creating reusable components that you can implement as Web services. The application in this case study solves the current problems of Electric Components, Inc. by effectively deploying components and Web services to enable reusability and provide a common platform.

Electric Components, Inc. Online Appraisal Application

Electric Components, Inc. has offices in the USA, Brazil, and Austria. The total number of employees is estimated to be 4,000. These employees are placed in different departments such as Finance, Production, Marketing and Sales, Customer Support, and Human Resources. In the United States, two Production units are located in Detroit, and the Sales and Marketing departments are located in New York and San Francisco. The company has a Production unit and a Sales and Marketing department in Brazil. It also has a Sales and Marketing department and a Customer Support department in Austria.

In recent years, Electric Components, Inc. has changed its appraisal policies. It has shifted from traditional methods to more aggressive target-based methods of evaluating performance. Because of issues such as delayed evaluations and non-transparency in the process, employees are not satisfied with the current appraisal system. Different people assess the performance for different appraisal periods, and the criteria used for assessing is not the same for all employees. Here are the major issues faced by the HR department:

• The amount of paperwork is large.

• The department cannot implement uniform policies because there are too many people involved in the process.

• Compilation of the evaluation ratings is a cumbersome task.

• Data from the previous years, only available on paper, is difficult to compile. This process is time-consuming for the HR department.

• Data is distributed across different files.

• Tracking performance over the years is impossible, and it causes problems while planning for successive years.

• The HR department can't plan the career development of employees according to their potential.

These problems may not seem very serious, but they affect the performance of the employees and the HR department in a drastic way. Therefore, HR consultants have been picked from all three countries, and they've formed a review team to look into the matter. This team is looking for a common application interface, keeping in mind that the databases for the three countries should remain separate. Because the policies followed in the three countries are different, and employees are rarely moved across countries, it's better to have distributed databases. Uniform policies can be implemented by using one common policy database.

To reduce the paperwork, the review team suggests using a relational database. This reduces paperwork, and it also makes the tracking of data easier because it's stored in the tabular form. The team suggests that all employees should participate in the appraisal process and give themselves ratings against the targets given to them. The reviewers need to be able to give the rating and recommendation online so that everyone concerned can keep track of the evaluation process. A Web-based front-end application, which can interact with a specified database, can fulfill this requirement.

Here are the advantages of the new application:

• There are individual databases for different countries.

• There's an online appraisal system that enables employees to directly log on and fill out the appraisal forms. They can see the ratings and recommendations given by the reviewer. This brings about the desired transparency in the system.

• HR consultants can implement uniform policies by using the common system. The policies that are different can be specified by country.

• Reviewers can also see the employees' forms and use the common performance evaluator to compile results.

• Because the data is stored in the database, it's easy to find out the performance of any employee for a given period.

The review team needs technical assistance to resolve issues such as working with different databases. Some features, such as user authentication, need to be developed in a separate module so that other applications in Electric Components, Inc. can use them as well.

After assessing the requirements for the project, the management decides to hire software consultants. The senior consultant suggests that a team of three developers should work with him on this project. After reviewing the initial set of requirements, the development team concludes that ColdFusion MX will be used for developing the Web-based Online Appraisal application. The application will implement the required features by using Web services and components. ColdFusion MX can deploy and use Web services and create components. The details of implementation will be completed in the Requirements Analysis phase. Electric Components, Inc. is already using time office and payroll applications, managed by the HR department. These applications use SQL Server 2000 databases. The appraisal system will use the existing database, with certain modifications.