Resource Planning Tool (RPT)

The Resource Planning Tool (or RPT for short) is a Web based application which supports the planning of human resources in a small or medium enterprise with a project oriented business. The main concepts of the RPT are tasks on one hand and employees on the other hand. Tasks need to be completed in a certain time by a limited amount of employees with specific skills. The RPT supports the process of associating tasks to the right employees in a way that due dates are met while every employee gets a constant workload. The interface of the RPT is divided into three major sections: Work: In this section, employees can see which tasks they are supposed to work on. The bar display indicates with colors on a half day basis whether an employee is free, occupied, overloaded or absent. More detailed information is displayed when the mouse pointer is being placed on a segment of the bar display. Plan: This section is made for project managers on one hand and for team leaders of the productive units in a company on the other hand. Project managers enter their needs for resources related to certain tasks, while team leaders allocate these tasks to employees on a specific date. Tasks that are allocated to an employee show up immediately in the "Work" section. Configure: All basic settings are made in this section. Here project managers can set up clients and their projects while team leaders can manage employees, functions and units. Especially important is the possibility to define working hours for every employee and to keep track of holidays to make an accurate planning possible. The RPT is meant to be a straight forward, easy to understand and fast application. It does not implement a multi-company architecture, nor is there a role model (in fact there are not even user logins). What's more, the RPT is a supporting tool for people who know what they are doing. There are some basic mechanisms to prevent users from entering data which doesn't make sense at all (i.e. entering an end date for a task that is smaller than the corresponding start date). About the Specification: The technical specification refers to the GUI specification (separate document). Each screen in the GUI specification has a name indicated in the footer lower right. The technical specification refers to these screens using the full name and a colored background. Technical Requirements From a technical point of view, the following aspects are crucial: - The RPT has to be implemented as a Web based application - The RPT must be based on Microsoft's .NET 2.0 framework and on Microsoft's SQL Server database. - The application must be implemented in the C# programming language. - If AJAX is used, this must be implemented with Microsoft's ATLAS framework. - Field labels, button names, tab captions as well as any other text visible in the web frontend must be stored in the database to make it easy to translate the whole application into another language than English. - All documentation (including comments in the source code) must be in English. - The application must run on Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 (or higher), Mozilla Firefox 1.5 (or higher) and Apple Safari 1.3 (or higher). Please refer to the attached documents for further details.