Client:	The Booth Company	Boulder, CO
Project:	Web-Based Platform and Portal for 360 Degree Employee Evaluation Surveys
Solution:	Custom C#/.NET Web Application, SQL Server Database, Crystal Reports, Transition from FoxPro Application

• “After working with Amadeus on several large-scale projects over the past few years, we admire their remarkable technical skills and rely on their ability to implement new systems and enhancements with a positive impact on our business.”
• – Tom Kuhne, Vice President and Chief Information Officer of The Booth Company

The Booth Company develops and administers “360 Degree” Feedback Surveys for executives and managers of Fortune 500 corporations. The company applies statistical validation on over 150 million responses and a comprehensive battery of measurements on key management skills. Founded in 1972, Booth is an established leader in customized 360 Degree survey development, human resources consulting and training.

The company had developed a custom report application and graphic user interface in Visual FoxPro to manage its growing volume of reports. The application was integrated with their web site to provide clients with online access to their survey results in print and electronic formats.

Their aging system was limited by its error handling abilities and the report designs and formats it could support. The company’s web site, developed in ASP and VBScript, presented system integration issues and made modifications to the web application difficult since they required reconstruction of the entire web page for any changes to the application.

The Booth Company retained Amadeus Consulting to develop a new and improved web-based system for report generation and distribution. The .NET Framework was the obvious choice to replace ASP for its ability to separate the presentation and application layers, decoupling the user interface from the business logic making modifications to either much easier. This also gave Booth far greater freedom and flexibility in the design and formatting of their survey reports.

The old application’s report generator would stop upon encountering any errors and required user intervention to resolve and restart. For the new system, Amadeus developed a Windows Service which ran in the background and continued responding to new requests and generating reports while errors were logged, batched and reported.

In designing the system, Amadeus reverse engineered the old application to replicate and enhance all of the existing functionality. Crystal Reports was utilized for report generation and to replicate the original Microsoft Word-based reports, stretching Crystal Reports to the limits of its capabilities. The final Report Processing Engine is very error-resilient and handles multiple format and distribution options including export to PDF format.

After completing the overhaul of the report generation system, Amadeus worked with Booth to modernize the web-based survey system that was the input to their reporting system. The Amadeus development team worked closely on site with Booth’s graphic design team in providing a state-of-the-art survey interface that worked in conjunction with the new report delivery system, the legacy FoxPro data maintenance system, and the centralized SQL database. The survey site utilized the Amadeus .NET Core Components to provide the Booth design team with HTML templates that they could use to modify the look and feel of the entire site without the involvement of the development team.

Once the survey and report generation was modernized, Booth wanted a portal system for end users who were taking part in self evaluations and receiving the 360 degree feedback reports. Amadeus developed this portal as an ASP.NET website, again relying on the Amadeus Core Components to provide the Booth design team the flexibility to modify the UI. The portal allowed users a central place to take the surveys, keep track of the number of responses from supervisors, peers, and direct reports, as well as receive their feedback reports.

The portal includes a new Questions Library Database which supports many different question forms and dynamically links surveys to the questions database via “Survey Mapping” so that surveys with modified or derivative questions are mapped to the original survey question. This enables reporting and analysis to join similar question records and automatically adjust responses for uniform comparison. Survey objects are decoupled from their presentation format, leveraging the advanced capabilities of the .NET Framework. This enables surveys to be easily deployed on multiple platforms including web; print; PDA; and off-line surveys, enabled by a browser plug-in using X-Forms technology.