Johannesburg, 23 Oct 2014
Local business solutions provider, AccTech Systems, has sponsored a group of students from the University of Pretoria's School of Information Technology to develop a software solution as part of their final year course.
The team won the first place overall, as well as the Investec Innovation Award, out of 18 teams competing in this year's competition.
AccTech Systems CEO Tertius Zitzke says the students approached AccTech Systems to assist them with a project they had to develop as part of their final year programme. "Considering that it had to work in a business environment, management suggested that they develop a new resource scheduler for AccTech Systems, to make the management and allocation of resources easier and more effective."
The new system had to keep track of employees, leave, skills, projects, resources, consultants' availability and meetings. Previously, AccTech Systems used a manual system to keep track of employees and consultants. The problem was each system had a different purpose and they didn't integrate with one another.
Appropriately named AccTion, the time scheduler and resource management solution had to cater for leave, meetings, training and projects. It also had to show resource availability and update dynamically as changes were made to the consultants' schedules.
The final year team says previously, a project meeting was held once every fortnight in which resource issues were discussed. "This wasted a huge amount of valuable time. Consultants' time was totally mismanaged, some had too much work and others didn't have any."
"The project and business unit manager also had to keep track of appropriate skills allocation to project and scheduled leave on a separate sheet, which resulted in a lot of unnecessary paperwork. The need therefore existed for a single system that incorporated the data from the different systems into one application," she explained.
Zitzke says the aim of the new system was to streamline the current workflow within the company. "The project managers will use the system to manage the consultants in such a way that their availability is visible at all times. In so doing, the workload will be more evenly distributed among consultants and productivity will increase."
Employee skills are now also updated and staff is assigned to projects according to their specific skills. Furthermore, the hours of consultants are now tracked by using time sheets.
As a project is confirmed and gets the go-ahead, it is added to the system. Resources are then assigned to the project and relevant staff is able to edit project phases as well as view past projects. The full system will be developed in ASP.NET and the scheduling part of the system will be duplicated in a mobile application.
AccTion shows the availability of consultants and also allows project managers to assign available resources to projects, which in turn creates an opportunity to handle a much larger workload and increase productivity. AccTion also allows support staff to schedule available consultants to support tickets, improving the response time to client issues and subsequently improving customer satisfaction.
Zitzke congratulated the Coalition team on a well-executed project and wished them well for the future. "These students are the future of IT and AccTech Systems is proud to be involved in skills development and also part of their success. AccTech Systems is a forward looking company, we want to be part of new technological advancements because this is what we pride ourselves in providing our clients."
Share