Introduction

The aim of this project is to create a distributed system to provide a structured method of submitting and managing payroll queries. The system will enable management from across a number of different sites to submit queries in a structured way to a centralised payroll department. Payroll personnel will be able to use the system to retrieve and manage the queries that will be stored in the database. The payroll manager will be able to query the database to produce weekly statistics for their reports. A web based solution will ensure that management with intranet access will be able to use the system without installing additional software and having to update that software when system changes are made.

Problem Domain

The centralised payroll department of a large organisation spread across a number of sites processes the salary of thousands of employees who receive their wage on a weekly or monthly basis. If an employee feels that their wage is wrong they will report this to their manager who will then submit a query to the payroll department and await a reply.

In order for the payroll department to process the query they need a number of details relating to it, a system that ensures that all the required information to process a query exists is needed. All managers should be able to submit and retrieve replies to their queries. Also should a manager submit another query relating to one previously submitted or an employee re queries an issue it is essential that their previous submitted queries can be quickly retrieved by the payroll department.

The payroll department aim to resolve all queries within two days of receiving them under their service level agreement therefore an effcient automated system would make sure this is met. Payroll personnel need to be able to view the history of a particular query and add comments to it to make sure they are not wasting time resolving queries already being dealt with and to hand queries over to a new person. A solution must be found that ensures queries are not lost and are resolved in order of arrival to make sure the department meets its service level agreement.

The payroll manager uses the queries to provide statistics e.g. the number of queries in the last week which were caused by the employee's manager and those that were caused by the payroll department in the form of reports to the sites which take a considerable amount of time to compile; this means that all queries must be stored for this purpose. The payroll manager would also like to monitor the performance of the payroll personnel who resolve the queries e.g. amount of queries resolved on a particular day and average time taken to resolve a query.