Challenge
City Colleges of Chicago employs over 7,000 employees. Employees are staffed at various locations and work a variety of shifts. Before working with Krasan, newly hired employees were required to come to the district office to attend a half-day new employee orientation meeting which was held once a month. Some attendees of the event may have been employed for weeks, while others may have been working for only a few days. In addition, some colleges would conduct their own new employee orientation meetings. The original orientation format was attended by representatives from each department at the district office to give individual “live” presentations on their respective areas during the orientation meeting. City Colleges wanted to automate the new employee orientation process to allow orientation to be standardized and within the same time frame for all employees.
Solution
Our role was to design and develop the New Employee Orientation online application with additional components to manage and extend the abilities of the application. We created a project plan after gathering all the business requirements and content.
The application was designed and developed using Microsoft technologies in .net and the web pages were developed using HTML and Flash programming. The application was integrated successfully with Oracle’s PeopleSoft and provided single sign-on functionality by integrating with LDAP. Administrative pages were also created and made editable based on specific security permissions for managing the content and user links in the application.
Outcome
The application was tested and roll out was done with a phased approach to all users. All new employees of City Colleges of Chicago use the orientation application instead of attending an in person meeting and they are able to get up to speed quickly.
