Chapter 12: Project Case Study - Creating the Knowledge Bank Application

In Chapter 11, "Using the <cffile> Tag to Upload a File," you learned how to work with files. In this chapter, you'll create a Knowledge Bank application by using the file-handling concepts you learned in Chapter 11. In this project, you'll upload files, create directories, read text files, and perform various other file functions. Before starting this project, you need to take a look at the project's case study. This chapter describes the case study and design of the Knowledge Bank application for Safe Health Pharma, a pharmaceutical company.

Safe Health Pharma Knowledge Bank Application—The Present Scenario

Safe Health Pharma is a research-based pharmaceutical company with approximately 4,500 employees. The company performs research in areas such as vitamins and fine chemicals, health foods, animal health care, pharmaceuticals, and new drugs. These Research and Development (R&D) wings are situated in France, Ireland, New Zealand, India, and Peru, respectively. The company headquarters is in Ontario, Canada.

Although Safe Health Pharma performs research on a large scale in diverse areas, its information storage and access system is localized. All research work, new developments or findings, and results are maintained at the same research center. Only crucial findings are reported in detail to the head office at Ontario. The fundamental reason for following this localized system is to avoid information leakage. However, this system has certain shortcomings. In the current scenario, Safe Health Pharma is facing the following problems:

• The knowledge that an individual gains during research doesn't go beyond the individual. The organization does not gain from that knowledge.

• Research centers are unaware of each other's findings and projects, leading to research overlaps.

• Since there's no central reference system, new employees have to spend a considerable amount of time finding out about ongoing research.

• Any new discovery or development in related areas by any other center takes time to reach the team of scientists it concerns because there is no direct central access to information.

• Senior scientists have to spend a lot of time explaining the results of earlier experiments to junior scientists due to lack of proper documentation and access to the required information.

All these drawbacks result in wasted time and other resources. Because the current information storage and access system is inefficient, the company's management has decided to modify it. After discussions and interviews with the employees at various centers, management has decided to use a Web-based Knowledge Bank application to store all the required information in a systematic manner. The research teams from all the centers will be able to use this application.