Business Problem: Corporate Testing and Training

The rapidly growing hardware, lumber, and garden-supply retailer, Main Street Hardware, runs an employee training program. Employees can take courses in a variety of areas and measure their progress by taking tests. Each course falls under one of the following category headings:

• Knowledge. Employees study specific areas of the home-improvement business such as decks, doors, electrical systems, floors, gardening, gutters, plumbing, siding, walls, and windows.
• Functional skills. Employees develop specific skills that are directly related to their jobs, such as forklift operation or carpet installation.
• Job safety skills. Employees learn specific safety skills such as CPR or the appropriate treatment for electrical shock victims.

Recently, the company's executives decided they needed a reliable, secure, and easily accessible application that could track their employees' progress.

Because Main Street Hardware wants to use this tracking application in its newly opened branch offices in Japan and Germany, the application must be globalized and then localized into Japanese and German.

The Human Resources (HR) department at Main Street Hardware requested that their Information Technology (IT) group, located at corporate headquarters in Oklahoma City, develop an application that would enable managers to track their employees' skills development.

The IT group determined that it could not complete the project within the specified timeframe and sought out a third party to undertake the work. They selected LitWare, Inc., a small independent software vendor (ISV) specializing in custom application development on the Microsoft® BackOffice® platform.