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Background
British Petroleum is a hemisphere-spanning corporation that "provide[s] customers with fuel for transportation, energy for heat and light, lubricants to keep engines moving and petrochemical products used to make everyday items." They wanted to develop an intranet program that would allow employees to give awards to other employees for performance.
Upon submitting, a manager is sent an email for approval or denial based on the employee's recommendation. The manager then views the employee recommendation for award. If accepted, a notification email is sent to the recommended employee. If declined, the manager is able to request more info with a follow-up email sent to the recommending employee, allowing for the process to repeat or for an outright denial of the recommendation. We were also brought in to program custom reporting that shows what awards were given by whom, what specific award was given to the employee, the date range for awards received and the receiving employee's name. An additional benefit of this program is that everything is entirely paperless.
Objectives
A custom-designed intranet that would allow BP employees to reward each other for outstanding performance was needed. BP knew SYDCON was capable of its development and was trusted to accomplish these tasks:
- Program front-end of intranet web facing
- Catalogue employee names as well as types of rewards available and past rewards received inside a database
- Program additional features such as:
- Workflow Process system
- Employee ability to "gift" an award to another employee
- Manager approval for sent gifts, ask for additional details in reference to the credibility of the gift, or decline gift
- Employee notification upon award approval and reception
Methodology
This was a fairly unique situation as British Petroleum already has a website programmed and designed, what they needed was a secure intranet site developed within their own secure internet site. SYDCON, Inc. therefore used the existing scripting languages ASP, CSS, and HTML for the sake of compatibility with the previously existing web material. Our programmers have extensive experience using all scripting languages to write code and can do so effectively. The existing intranet website was already powered by an MSSQL database, which we added to in order to power the applications we were adding.
A proposal specifically tailored for British Petroleum was given to them along with a description of what was needed from them to ensure the website's full working capability. The development of the website was started upon mutual agreement over the contract.
A development team of one expert programmer utilized the following steps in the development process:
- Discussed the client's goals
- Employee names and potential rewards added to the database
- Displayed the mentioned database content on the website to finish front-end development
- Finished website tested with BP
- Launched website
Technical Approach
ASP, CSS, and HTML scripting languages were utilized in the programming of the intranet website. An existing MSSQL backend was used to drive the website content as well as give administrative ability to whoever is to preside over the website. The additional features mentioned previously were also programmed and added to the website.
Results
This project is successful and appreciated by the client.
- British Petroleum now has a fully-functional intranet website that enables employees to recognize each other for their hard work
- Users can easily find each employee and acknowledge their performance with a reward forwarded to management for approval, editing or declining. The employee receiving the award is able to see who recommended them for the award as well as the reasons for their receiving it. Management can see which employees have received awards, and for what
- The custom-developed intranet allows for staff to maintain the application and make updates as needed. There is also an extremely high security clearance to protect the corporation and its employees
- The website has been effective at rewarding employees from within for their performance which has raised employee morale
There are three main reasons our work with British Petroleum was successful:
- The precise communication of British Petroleum in reference to their objectives for this specific project
- The time taken by British Petroluem to work with SYDCON throughout site development
- The well-versed talents of our expert programmers and project lead at SYDCON