Project Summary: Parent of National Hotel Corporation
Background
In 2003 and 2004, SDI’s Wally McClure worked to upgrade an application for the department within the parent company of a national hotel corporation that handles the billing questions for all of the corporation's properties.
The old system was designed to track efficiencies of work performed, taking into account projects, individuals’ job grades, and amount of work performed. The base application was unstable, inefficient, and resulted in poor performance when handling large numbers of users. A secondary problem was that certain pieces of the application were “hard coded” for the year 2003.
What did we do?
The system upgrade required that we:
- Improve stability of the application.
- Improve response time of the application for users.
- Provide maintenance and reporting capabilities for management.
The first goal of this project was to inventory what, exactly, was included in the application. We had to determine what worked and what did not work, and where there were potentials for problems. The second goal was to improve stability. Under heavy load, the application had a tendency to cause a database failure, which brought the entire system down. The third goal was to resolve issues around the hard coding (of the project year 2003) throughout the application. The fourth goal was to resolve problems with the reporting module. And the last goal was to improve performance of the application. This was resolved by using more efficient database commands.
About the Application
The new system is an ASP application written in VBScript using Sql Server 2000 as the backend database. All in all, the upgrade was a complete success; all goals mentioned above were resolved.
