Software - Case Studies

Case Study 1: Online Professorship Book
Case Study 2: Foreign Employee Open Enrollment
Case Study 3: Roche Bioscience
Case Study 4: Track Training Compliance


Case Study 1: Online Professorship Book

The Challenge: Keeping Faculty Data Current and Available
Stanford University wanted to enable online publication of its professorship and directorships book. The book contains all relevant data associated with the university professorships and directorships and chair holders. It was published once every five years with annual smaller update publications. The process was expensive and hard to distribute. Stanford wanted to create an online system that provided up-to-date and easily accessed faculty and chair data saving printing costs.

The Solution: A Data-driven Online Publication
Leveraging an existing legacy database, Postgrads, we made the data available and searchable by users from the web. We rendered the publication's pages as HTML and PDF. Each page is available for on-the-fly high quality printing from the database as Adobe Acrobat PDF file.

The Benefits: Client Cost Savings and User Satisfaction
With the on-line professorship book, the university was able to eliminate print publication costs. Faculty data is available to web users as soon as it is entered into the database. Users can browse or search the professorship book on-line and print desired pages as high-quality PDF files.

Technology Solution: Leveraging Existing Components
The technology used is Java with a Sybase database. The system consists of a desktop and a web-based application. Both portions use the existing security system to control access. The administrative desktop application is used to load images, biographies and control the publication of records to the web. The challenge was to make use of the data already contained in Postgrads and integrate it into the application. The additional data which is not contained in the Postgrads system is kept in separate database tables. These tables contain the images and biographies. The web-based portion has a public component which makes a limited amount of the data visible to the world and a secure component controlled by password which makes more complete information available.

Browse the public Professorship System

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Case Study 2: Foreign Employee Open Enrollment


The Challenge: Providing Global Access to Employee Benefits Election
The institution had a need to gather the details on current year benefits elections for overseas employed. The employees being addressed were being provided options that were different from the plan offered to the local staff. In prior years, data was collected in hard copy which had to be manually assembled and submitted to the appropriate insurance companies. This was a long and tedious process where getting a correctly completed form from the remote employees took many iterations. Once the information was complete the data had to be manually captured and reported to the covering agencies.

The Solution: Web-Enabled Benefits Selection Tool
The screens were developed with Asp and VB Script. The employees were given a user id and password. The static employee information which the employees did not have access to modify was entered into MS Access by the administrator. Once the application was published, the employees had immediate access to their data and could make changes to the areas available to them. They could then print a hard copy for their records.

After all employees had reviewed and corrected their benefit elections for the year, the application was taken down. The administrator is able to print reports from the Access database which is used to supply the employee benefits options to the insurance companies.

The Benefits: Cost Savings through User Control, Error Reduction and Adaptability
With the on-line tool the user was given the ability to change the data and get immediate feedback regarding the coverage and cost to them. The generation of the carrier reports by the administrator was a trivial matter with very little effort involved. The possibility of errors in transposing the data from the employee forms to the carrier reports was eliminated. The rates for all of the benefit options are contained in the database which makes changing them each year a simple process.


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Case Study 3: Roche Bioscience


The Challenge: A Central Data Validation Tool for Clinical Trials

The Roche Bioscience project was to develop a Medical Thesaurus for use world-wide in validation and classifying medical terms submitted by field medical delivery personnel working on clinical trials. The existing Clinical Trial system was required to accept terms submitted from the trials personnel. Once the terms were received they had to be classified and converted into standard terminology. The standardized and classified terms could then be processed using statistical analysis tools.

The Solution: Converting to a Meta Data Driven System
The installed system held repositories of different structures. The system developed used metadata to allow definitions of all of the current structures and was designed to be able to handle new structures.

Benefits: Integrity of Mission-Critical Data
All of the metadata, business and data integrity rules were captured in the data model used to drive the system. The resulting system was extremely stable and since its installation there have been virtually no data integrity violations detected.

Solution Architecture Detail:
The architecture used was an Oracle Database and Oracle Forms. The client-server application was converted to run from a web browser using a Java applet to provide the user with access to the applications.

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Case Study 4: Track Training Compliance


The Challenge: Track compliance to employee training requirements.
Biomedical companies involved in developing drugs are required by the FDA to provide and report on training to their employees. They can also be audited at any time and are required to produce training compliance reports.

The company had a database which captured the training records along with training requirements. The problem was the lack of a system for reporting on the training activity and identification of compliance problems. The training records were tied into a legacy which could not be changed, making it difficult to change the training component.

The Solution: Create a set of customized report to track training compliance
A set of highly customized database procedures were developed using the existing data. The reports identified training compliance and training history. Data was reported by various organizational structure levels. The reports provided visibility to individual detail reports as well as compliance percentages at each level.

Benefits: Control reports given to managers
Using the reports, managers were able to track the compliance of all personnel to required training. The reports are available whenever an audit is requested by the FDA. This was done with no changes made to the larger system.

Solution Architecture Detail:
The system used access as a database. The tracking system used a highly customized set of queries, forms and reports to manage and deliver the information.

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