Human Resources Tracking System

 

Developed by: Bill Scharf

Faculty Advisor: Charles Massey

 

Client

The Eastern Administration Zone of the US Forest Service is composed of more than 1,200 employees in over 75 units spread throughout 13 states and Puerto Rico.? There is one Human Resources department, which services all the positions in the entire zone.

 

Purpose

The HR department receives over a thousand requests a year and up until now attempted to track their processing via spreadsheets.? This is cumbersome at best and requires many reports to be manually typed each week.? The units, our customers, are dissatisfied with our timeliness and communication with them.? They demand more than a weekly report and timeliness guidelines, in federal workdays, have been handed down the chain of command.? The old system could not track workdays, let alone offer a statistical analysis of each step in the process.? Data integrity, concurrent user support data normalization and duplication, and standardization of abbreviations are all serious problems.? The database solves each of these issues and adds extra functionality.

 

Conclusion

To implement this project I learned VBA (Visual Basic for Applications), FTP programming, and batch programming.? I also increased my knowledge of VBScript.? I created two search forms, one to search by keyword and the other to search for certain words within certain fields.? I had to create appropriate data structures to facilitate each search form as well as to calculate workdays and interface MS Access with the US FS Lotus Notes email system.? This real world experience has been invaluable and has given me confidence that I can succeed as a computer professional.

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