Development of “Huckabee Assessment Software Portal” for its client ‘Huckabee & Associates’ and how the portal helped them to assess the deficiencies in various educational institutions based on different disciplines with the help of deficiency photos and locations.
Client Overview
Huckabee & Associates is a leading architectural firm in Texas catering mainly to educational institutions.
Problem
Client was unable to automate a largely manual process and searching for an efficient software portal to accomplish this.
Solution
Development of an efficient Software Program to help Huckabee assess the deficiencies in educational institutions, based on different disciplines with the help of deficiency photos and locations.
Result
The Huckabee Assessment program developed by Insight Consultants now helps the client to asses the deficiencies in educational institutions, based on different disciplines with the help of deficiencies in educational institutions.
Business Objectives
Huckabee Associate’s key requirement was the development of a system that can automate a largely manual process, save time and increase the volume of work.
Business Solution
After analyzing clients requirement, Insight identifies the right solution is the development of a Software Portal with features like:
- Automate a largely manual process, save time and increase the volume of work that the team could handle.
- Should provide a secure online space where Assessors and Associate Principals could collaborate effectively and efficiently.
- To effectively use data entered by Assessors in the Fulcrum App (Fulcrum is a mobile data gathering application) so that they would not have to re-enter the data to use it.
- Allow Assessors to associate images taken on location with specific areas in the facility, which in turn would be associated with deficiencies and tasks.
- Able to generate PDF reports and summaries in a pre-determined format as often as required.
Insight Consultants used the following approach to address the business objectives:
- Build an assessment system – HASP which can use the information in Fulcrum.
- All features need to be permission driven
- Integrate with Fulcrum to transfer the pictures and data stored in Fulcrum.
- Provide an interactive canvas to Assessors to connect photos to floor plans
- Integrate with a good PDF generator to generate rich pdfs that contain a large number of photos and huge amount of data.
ASP.Net MVC was chosen to build the application as it is the best technology to meet the business objectives.
Security Features implemented in Huckabee Assessment Software Portal
- Password Encryption – All passwords are encrypted using BCrypt, which is a one-way encryption algorithm. This means, passwords cannot be retrieved, only regenerated.
- The application is served out using the HTTPS protocol to ensure encrypted network transport.
- Permissions – Every user in the application has permissions that are explicitly granted based on the role to which they belong. All functionality in the application is enabled or disabled based on these permissions. Every user action is logged in the database with a timestamp and detailed audit reports are generated on demand.
Hosting
Huckabee Assessment Software Portal is hosted on Microsoft Azure in a Windows 2012 R2 VM and uses SQL Server 2014 as the database server.
Technical Challenges
Though the connection to Fulcrum was seamless, the data in fulcrum is unstructured. To overcome this challenge, we had to develop business logic to efficiently parse the data to a usable format.
Outcome
HASP was launched in Jun 2015. HASP has increased the number of projects the assessors of Huckabee and Associates can simultaneously work on.
About Insight Consultants
Insight Consultants (subsidiary of Stylus Systems) is in the business of transforming enterprises and impacting lives through information technology based solutions and by delivering services ethically. Established in 1999, in Bangalore, India, Stylus has achieved expertise in developing and using internet based technologies and solutions to bring the advantages of the global marketplace to small and medium business enterprises worldwide, thereby helping them take their offerings to market faster, and operate better, smarter and more profitably. Our Software, Finance and Accounting Services and Solutions are specialized services that are offered with the Business Intelligence suite of Services to help us deliver recommended steps of action and take bottom-line for your results.
We look at a client’s business problems in a systematic manner that eventually gives both Insight Consultants, and the client, a clear view of what’s required and why, what needs to be done about it, and how it’s impact on your organisation’s success. We help you get a sense of your business, through Radical Rooting, our home-grown approach to help businesses place premium on the future value of a solution or idea before counting costs.
Gale Moericke
President, Crux Technology & Security Solutions
I have worked with IT consultants over the years and found Insight Consultants to be among the best. They are very thoughtful in their approach, ask very good questions to understand our needs and explore options. They act as a natural extension of my team and we had none of the classic issues in using an offshore partner. Insight Consultants is very good at working across time zone and distance barriers. I would not hesitate to engage them again.
