Requirements:

The company sell a range of heavy duty Uninterruptible Power Supplies to companies throughout the world. In addition they also support all their installations, executing maintenance and repairs out in the field as necessary

They performed their own requirements elicitation and came up with an outline specification. They also supplied the form their field engineers use to submit their time and materials use with. The timesheet application was to interact with the there accounting system which runs on an MS SQL backend database system. Submitted timesheets were to be authorised before the accounting systems were updated.

Solution:

Initially Cynetix took the sheet and replicated it in HTML. The next step was to liaise with the company to work out all the field mappings so the completed sheet could update the database directly. In addition the validation options were sorted out so as a user filled in the sheets, validation could be performed to stop mis-entry of information. To aid the validation AJAX web technologies were implemented. The benefit of this is two fold, as the user types in a part number used on a job, the web page automatically retrieves the part description and checks that it’s valid giving the user instant feedback on their entry. The second benefit is that using this method, bandwidth is kept to a minimum as the user no longer needs to keep refreshing the page to see part numbers.

The solution was coded in PHP with database storage being provided by MS SQL. Emails are sent to various recipients throughout the process of filling in and authorising the timesheets. User authenticity is tested to check that people really are authorised to sign off timesheets, that they are the engineer’s supervisor and so on. Use of AJAX technologies helped to reduce the bandwidth requirements and give the users a better experience.