Competency: Custom Application Development

Customer Profile:

One of the largest federal systems integrator principally engaged in the research, design, development, manufacture, integration & sustainment of advanced technology systems, products and services.

Customer Challenge/Need:

Our customer develops and manages the data captures systems for national census programs. There are more than 300 different types of questionnaires/forms that are processed into digital format. In order for the system to properly process each form, they must be defined and registered to the system. This process is called Forms Definition and is critical for production efficiency and success.

Forms definition is a multi-part process that consists of creating several large xml files, jpeg images, tif images, et al. Several tools were in place to facilitate this process, however it was taking approximately 6 man-days per form and was still prone to some error.

Evolver Solution:

Evolver created an enhanced GUI application (retiring several tools used) in order to decrease the amount of time needed to define a form and decrease the error rate and associated rework. Time spent defining forms were decreased by the ability to:

• Automate previously manual processes
• Edit multiple fields within a form at once
• Copy & paste fields between forms
• Introduce concept of filed templates – templates that can be applied to similar fields across forms
• Add find and replace functionality to the application

Errors were decreased by:

• Including a “build” process that checks for common errors
• Increased error handling within the application
• Introduced a wizard process to guide the developer through form definition

Using the new process, forms definition was reduced 67% to 2 days, and the ability to define similar forms in different languages was reduced to a few hours. A wizard like interface written in C sharp (C#) was added to allow “non-developers” to define forms, thereby allowing entry level personnel to be hired to perform this task. Higher productivity, lower costs, better quality - now that’s progress, that’s Evolver.

For more information on our complete offering of IT solutions including custom application development call Evolver, Inc. at 703.742.4090.