CASE STUDY: Biwater - Webtime

Tools: Excel & Visual Basic for Applications
Industry: Water Treatment Solutions
Application: Contract Review System

Overview

Biwater Treatment Limited is a leading worldwide supplier of water treatment solutions. It undertakes the design and construction of water and wastewater infrastructure, incorporating intake works, reservoirs, dams, treatment works and pipelines A new timesheet recording system to replace the current paper-based system was required. Village Software Engineering Limited provided an Intranet application for employees to record timesheets and heads of departments to approve them. The system linked into existing accounting system and attendance system.

Return on Investment

Off the shelf time sheet systems are available which undoubtedly provide a cheaper solution to the recording of attendance. However the usefulness of this bespoke system is that it applies a series of business rules appropriate to the specific business while at the same time fulfilling both the attendance monitoring requirements and the contract accounting requirements. A key benefit is the web-orientated delivery that allows the system to be made available throughout the company without any PC installations.

Solution

The partial screen shot above, taken from within Internet Explorer, displays the time for one engineer over a week. The data is entered against different categories for remuneration purposes. The system also classifies the time against contract, divisions of contracts and also by different activities such as project management or civil engineering.

The web front end seen here is connected to the accounting database (in this case an Informix Database) which is used to validate classifications in real time as well as storing the final result.

Additional facilities allow employees to record attendance as well as contract time; this is collected into a legacy attendance system. An authorisation hierarchy is supported through the system.

Technology

An intranet-based application was chosen in order to reduce installation and maintenance costs.

Webtime is operating system independent and can be accessed by employees on the Biwater intranet and through a dial up link. Apart from the web browser no software is required on the employees computer.

The Web Scripting language Perl was used to develop the application server. It runs on a Linux based Apache web server. This code spoke to the existing Informix databases. A considerable amount of code was also added to the client written in JavaScript, this allowed some immediate calculations to be run and for some data entry checking without returning to the server. Careful thought had to be given to load balancing the system between the database, web server and web client this was particularly needed due to the lists of existing contracts that data entry needed to be checked against.

Alternative technologies could have been used. Any Relational Database Management system could have been used Village could have developed the solution in Oracle, SQL Server, Interbase or PostgreSQL as well as the Informix system used here.

Any scripting language could have been used. Village uses ASP/VBScript as well as the PERL scripting language used here.

General Conclusions

This is a small system with sophisticated but focussed functionality. Such a system might cost £7,000 to £12,000 depending on the complexity of the business rules required. A system such as this once it is successful is often then expanded to increase the functionality and reporting