Fitch & Mather Sample: Analysis

Scott Stanfield
Vertigo Software, Inc.

September 1998

Summary: Looks at FMCorp, a Web-based expense report system developed by Vertigo Software, Inc., a Microsoft Certified Solution Provider. (8 printed pages) Discusses the issues and strategies involved in the development of this full-feature n-tier application.

Analysis

Fitch & Mather, a fictitious company, approached us with a business problem. Employees were complaining that their expense reports were being lost and management was frustrated with lengthy paperwork. They wanted a solution that was flexible, inexpensive, and met their new goals. The project resulted in FMCorp, a Web-based expense report system.

Fitch & Mather hired Vertigo Software, Inc., a Microsoft Certified Solution Provider, to migrate their Microsoft® Excel spreadsheet system to an effective n-tier application. The following set of documents will give you an idea about the planning, analysis, design, and development phases that resulted in FMCorp. Along the way, we'll discuss the issues and strategies involved with the development of a full-feature n-tier application.

Meet the Players

Throughout these documents, we'll refer to four fictitious people in our examples. They represent the different roles employees play at FMCorp. The sample expense reports will cover a three-day trip to Comdex, in Las Vegas, Nevada, for Alice and Dolores, plus Jack's day trip to see his client in San Jose, California.

Current Scenario

In order to understand the new requirements, it is important to understand the current document flow.

The existing expense report scenario worked as follows:

1. Bob attends TechEd '98 and puts the hotel, airfare, and meals on his personal credit card.
   
   
2. Bob opens the latest Excel expense report template when he gets back to the office.
   
   
3. He fills out the form, prints a copy, attaches his receipts, and gives it to his boss, Julie.
   
   
4. Julie scans the line items and the total amount on the reimbursement request. If approved, she sends it to accounting so they can cut Bob a check. Otherwise, the expense report is returned, explaining that gambling losses on riverboat casinos are not reimbursable.

What's Wrong with This Method

Fitch & Mather discovered many problems with the current procedure:

• Printing costs and paper trail. Needless paper copies and duplicates are created as the reimbursement request travels through the company.
  
  
• Can't easily track status. Employees who have submitted reports don't know where the report is in the approval process.
  
  
• Inconsistent policy enforcement across departments. Some departments enforce policies more liberally than others do. Company-wide spending limits are less likely to be followed with the current procedure.
  
  
• Lost reports. Some reports are misplaced and employees go unpaid for months.
  
  
• Unnecessary routing. Passing requests between departments generates unnecessary paperwork.
  
  
• Mistakes in enforcing policy limits. Because Julie is reviewing the line items by hand, it is difficult to enforce documented policies. For example, Fitch and Mather sets a limit on hotel costs on a daily basis. If Bob spent more than $300 on the hotel on a given night, Julie is supposed to return the form and request additional documentation.

Requirements

In order to come up with requirements for a new solution, Fitch & Mather assembled a small team. The team of information technology (IT) managers and employees discussed the problems with the current system and came up with their own goals, which are summarized as follows.

IT Group

• All information stored in a central database. This requirement makes it easy to back up information and ensure reliability.
  
  
• Standardized administrative tools. IT wants custom forms for adding new users to the system.
  
  
• Low rollout costs. Distribution of the current and subsequent versions should not require a new installation on every workstation.
  
  
• An extensible and distributed system. An extensible system would allow future HR components to be integrated without a major rewrite of the current system. A distributed system would enable administrators to spread the load to multiple machines.
  
  
• Managers are responsible for their employees. IT wants each manager to administer his or her own employees.

Management

• Better expense report tracking. To ensure their employees stay within budget, management wants simple tools to gauge year-to-date and monthly spending without requesting reports from accounting. It should be easy to retrieve older, approved expense requests.
  
  
• Integration into accounts payable. After approval, the request should be automatically routed to accounts payable.
  
  
• Enforce business rules. The system should automatically reject expense reports that exceed spending limits.
  
  
• Use Excel template. Employees already familiar with the current Excel spreadsheet shouldn't need to learn a new program. The process can be adapted so the spreadsheet can be submitted without printing. Also, Employees should be able to work on expense requests offline while traveling.

Employees

• Easy to track status. Once the expense report is submitted, employees should be able to monitor the approval process.
  
  
• Quick notification of rejections. If an expense report is rejected, employees should be notified immediately so the problem can be corrected.
  
  
• Quick reimbursements. The entire process should make it faster to get reimbursed.

Scope/Limits

It is important to understand what we are not supposed to do. For the first version, Fitch & Mather do not require the following:

• Receipt handling. Employees submit their receipts separately from the reimbursement request.
  
  
• Detailed reports. A separate reporting engine can be added in future versions.
  
  
• Client platform. All Fitch & Mather workstations run Microsoft Windows® 95 or Windows NT® version 4.0. Microsoft Office 97 and Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 are set up on all workstations.

Number of Users

Fitch & Mather currently employs about 4,500 people. At any given time, we would not expect more than 1 percent of the company to be accessing the system.

Overview

FMCorp is a Web-based expense reimbursement system. Employees use the system to submit electronic expense reports that are routed and managed using a mixture of Microsoft BackOffice® tools and COM-based business rules. There are four tiers in this model:

• Web client
  
  
• Internet Information Server (IIS) Active Server Pages (ASP) logic
  
  
• Component Object Model (COM) components
  
  
• Database

Windows DNA Architecture

FMCorp system relies heavily on the Microsoft Windows Distributed interNet Applications Architecture (Windows DNA). You can learn more about Windows DNA at www.microsoft.com/dna/.

The first tier, or client level, uses Microsoft Excel and Internet Explorer 4.0. Users fill out an Excel template (the current template can be downloaded from the corporate Web site) and submit the report through a Web page using Internet Explorer. Netscape Navigator can also be used because of the platform independence of ASP-enabled sites, but with the loss of distinctive dynamic HTML (DHTML) features.

The second tier, or ASP level, is the Web-page script layer that builds dynamic pages and submits reports using the third-tier COM objects.

The third tier, or business objects level, uses a variety of COM objects built using the latest Microsoft Visual Studio® languages: Visual C++®, Visual J++™, and Visual Basic®. Multiple languages are used because our team members have individual strengths in different languages. Transaction Server manages the components and the Developer Studio® Analyzer tracks their performance.

The fourth tier, or database level, uses both a mail system and Microsoft® SQL Server™ 6.5. The COM objects submit requests via Active Data Objects (ADO) to an SQL Server database. Microsoft Exchange 5.5, or the optional SMTP mail service, notifies employees when their expense reports are received and approved (or rejected).

How It Works

After passing site security, employees will file an expense report by submitting a completed spreadsheet via the Web. The user has the option of viewing the status of all current expense reports while online.

The second-tier ASP code uses COM objects to funnel the data into SQL Server while validating the line items against business rules.

SQL Server processes the expense report and another COM object sends a summary message to the employee's manager. After the manager approves the expense report online, a status message is sent to the employee and a request for payment is sent to accounts payable.

The administrative Web component enables managers or accountants to view reports, manage an employee list, and set expense limits and categories. A site administrator manages the list of valid users and their managers for expense report routing.

What Is DNA?

According to the Windows DNA home page (www.microsoft.com/dna/), DNA is defined as follows:

Microsoft Windows Distributed interNet Applications Architecture is the framework for building modern, scalable, multitier business applications. Windows DNA applications can improve the flow of information within and outside of the organization; they are dynamic and flexible so they evolve with business needs; and they can be easily integrated with existing systems and data. Because Windows DNA applications use deeply integrated Windows platform services that work together, organizations can focus on delivering business solutions rather than on being systems integrators.

Windows DNA defines Microsoft's strategy for overall Internet application development. The underlying foundation of DNA is Microsoft's COM technology, which is essentially a software architecture that allows reuse of binary software components. COM is the glue that binds together the infrastructure of a DNA Web application.

Developers and application designers might shy away from the DNA market-speak. It's really more of a methodology than a turnkey solution. DNA describes how dozens of different products and technologies integrate.

DNA Products and Technologies

Some of the DNA products and technologies used by FMCorp are shown in the following table.

The Visual Studio 6.0 development system is the tool that enables developers to take advantage of these products and technologies. FMCorp was built using two of the primary applications in Visual Studio 6.0: Visual InterDev Web development system and Visual Basic development system.

Requirements

There are three classes of workstations: servers, clients, and development machines. Each has its own unique set of software requirements.

Servers

The servers can be configured in many ways, or with all components and applications on one server. However, all servers must have the following:

1. SQL Server 6.5 with Service Pack 3
   
   
2. Windows NT 4.0 Option Pack

Clients

1. Excel (to fill out an expense report; not needed by manager or for summary reports)
   
   
2. Internet Explorer 4.01

Developers

1. All of the client requirements
   
   
2. Any part of the server components they are developing with
   
   
3. Visual Studio 6.0

Technologies and Products

The following products and technologies were used in the development of FMCorp:

• Internet Explorer 4.0
  
  
• Windows NT Option Pack (IIS and MTS)
  
  
• Visual InterDev 6.0
  
  
• Visual J++ 6.0
  
  
• Visual Basic 6.0
  
  
• Visual C++ 6.0
  
  
• Visual Database Tools
  
  
• SQL Server 6.5
  
  
• Excel with Visual Basic for Applications (VBA)

The technologies found in FMCorp include, but are not limited to the following:

• DHTML
  
  
• COM
  
  
• Active Template Library (ATL)
  
  
• Active Server Pages
  
  
• VBScript and JScript development software
  
  
• Universal Data Access (ADO, RDS)
  
  
• Visual InterDev wizards and design-time controls (DTCs)
  
  
• Remote scripting library for transparent round-trips to the server
  
  
• Complete Web-site security using Windows NT Challenge and Response and Secure Sockets

Team Members

Conclusion

Although the requirements for this project were fictional, we tried to create a specification and architecture that would satisfy our fictitious client, Fitch and Mather. We found the requirements helpful in drafting the initial architecture because it allowed us to focus on the required goals instead of creating interesting but useless features.

About the Author

Scott Stanfield is the president of Vertigo Software, Inc. Vertigo Software is a San Francisco Bay Area-based consulting firm that specializes in the design and development of Windows DNA applications and components. He can be reached at scott@vertigosoftware.com or on the Web at http://www.vertigosoftware.com/.

For More Information

• For a full list of the documentation that accompanies the Fitch & Mather sample, see "Fitch & Mather Corporation Document List."
  
  
• To find out more about Microsoft Windows Distributed interNet Applications Architecture, see www.microsoft.com/dna/.