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The Problem
An environmental engineering company, working on a government contract with the US Navy, had the difficult problem of creating 200 monthly reports for work sites throughout the United States. With remote workers and a tight schedule it was difficult to ensure consistency and quality across all the reports.
Adding to the problem was an approval process that required four different reviews and approvals for each report. If problems were found during the review process the report had to be returned to the site manager, corrected and then fed back into the review workflow.
The company turned to WaterWare, as a government subcontractor, to develop a Web-based reporting application.
System Analysis
WaterWare started with a detailed analysis of the existing workflow, which was not well documented. Using one-on-one employee interviews, WaterWare standardized the report generation and approval process.
Each step of the workflow was documented, from the time a new report cycle was begun until the final reports were converted to PDF format and forwarded to the Navy.
The Solution
Based on a now uniform workflow, WaterWare implemented a Web-based application that allows project managers to create reports using a common template, thus assuring consistency across all job sites. To increase the quality and accuracy of the reports, workers use a browser-based spell checker just like in a desktop word processing application.
The application driven approval process allows workers to quickly edit the reports and move them forward to the next person in the workflow. If a problem is found, the report can easily be returned to a prior approval stage with the click of a mouse.
Since project managers are scattered throughout the country, an automated email notification module alerts them of any reports that need additional work. The same email module is used by supervisors to communicate with the over 200 workers involved in the project.
To ensure that all reports are ready on time, supervisors can filter and sort reports by where they stand in the approval workflow, easily finding reports that are falling behind.
Once all reports are approved, the information for that cycle is archived so that it can no longer be modified. The reports are automatically converted to PDF format and linked to from the Web site. Navy administrators then have the option of viewing a HTML version of the report while online, or using the PDF format, which has superior formatting and printing capabilities.
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