Case Study: Database-Driven Web Sites & Applications
The BC Forest Safety Council is an organization reliant on literally cutting and pasting together custom reports on the safety records and activities of BC's forest companies and workers. And with 3,900 company records and almost 9,000 worker records, that's a lot of cutting and pasting.
Our job was to create a flexible, robust set of database-driven applications that could help streamline and automate their record keeping and management. In addition, we recommended they tie those applications in to a new Drupal CMS Web site that we were building at the same time.
The results are helping them work better:
- A CMS-based Web site making it easier for them to publish the stream of forest safety alerts and statistics coming into them every day — while reducing their reliance on a single Webmaster and allowing each business unit to keep its own information up to date.
- Registration tool for companies to become part of the mandatory SAFE Companies program. Our application allows the Council to capture and manage detailed information about each company, and provides a seamless e-commerce interface that works with their Moneris account.
- A similar registration and account process for individual workers who sign up for mandatory and voluntary safety training courses.
- These tools are scalable and extensible: auto-data insertion technology, smart rendering and built-in paging support allow the application to work effectively with huge datasets.
- A training course management system that allows administrators to easily create courses, assign instructors, and review and approve course results.
- A Safety Audit Review tool (currently being built) that will allow multiple administrators to review each forest company's mandatory safety audit. It saves all review scores, notes and recommendations, and allows for editing by authorized personnel while safeguarding it from everyone else.
Ultimately, the data generated by these and many other tools are saved into a database, and this is where the real power comes for the BC Forest Safety Council. The dynamic reporting grid we've built contains each field of information — from that, users can generate customized reports that help them identify and analyze any kind of trend they wish. If they want to look at all companies from Nelson with 12 employees who failed their first audit but passed their second (oh, and who have an employee who took the Occupational Health & Safety training course), that detailed report is theirs in just a minute. Because of the complete filterability of every field and the user's ability to eliminate unnecessary fields from a customized report, even the most specific analysis can be undertaken.