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Background
Target Learning Consultancy work with colleges and private
training providers to facilitate partnerships to extend the
provision of learning and basic skills training within local
communities. One of the training companies they work with provides
a number of basic training courses for migrants. They achieve this
by delivering the training through colleges who are authorised to
draw down government funding for such training. There is a complex
schedule of fees, different for each college and course, and
dependent on various factors such as the number of attendees, the
number completing a course, the number passing the examination and
others.
Prior to SUMMIT's involvement Target managed all of the
operational parameters and recorded course attendances on a range
of interlinked spreadsheets which required a large amount of
manual data entry and regular amendments.
They wanted a single integrated system that would:
- Allow the complex arrangement of colleges, fees and courses
to be set up and managed easily
- Enable the individual course tutors to complete their course
registers on-line
- Provide a range of reports to drive the invoicing process to
ensure that revenues flowed promptly
- Provide additional information reports to facilitate
management decisions
- Ensure that access to the system was completely secure and
would permit authorised users access to only those functions
that they are permitted.
SUMMIT's
involvement
Target's principal, Hal Hamer, met with Ian Hayes for the first
time in May 2004 where the task was outlined in some detail. The
subtleties of the complexity would not, however, become apparent
until a later stage once the project was underway.
Following the first meeting, a proposal for the project was
provided that was subsequently accepted by Target and the project
was underway.
The first phase of the project was a further meeting to work
out more of the details of the requirements for the new
system. As is usually the case, some areas were simplified and
others turned out to be more involved than originally thought.
Primary development was completed within 6 weeks and a
beta-test version of the new system was posted onto the Internet
for testing, evaluation and feedback. Several adjustments and a
few minor additions were made to the system over the subsequent
weeks and the system eventually went live at the end of February
2005.
A pure
business operations system
One of the unique aspects to this project is the fact that is
has no public-facing aspect at all. The entire web site is
dedicated to providing the business functions necessary for Target
to carry out its business operations. If you were to go to the web
site, the first page you see is a simple login page. There is
nowhere else to go without logging in to one of the authorised
user accounts.
Once logged in, the functions available to you will depend on
which 'privileges' have been granted to your account. These vary
from a fully privileged 'master administrator' account that can do
everything, to a tutor's account that can access only the course
registers assigned to the account. There are other variations such
as course co-ordinator and finance administrator privileges.
Within the functions of the system are all of the usual things
that you would expect to find in a business operations system, the
difference is that this is a web site and hence is accessible to
all the authorised users wherever they are, at any time - as long
as they have access to the Internet.
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