Helping Schools Ensure That No Child Gets Left Behind
Application
Description
- Portal for educators to manage student assessment programs
Advantages
- Assessment information available On Demand
- Single code base
- Application can be customized for each customer
- Scalable architecture
CLIENT BACKGROUND
Harcourt Assessment, Inc. is part of Harcourt, Inc., a global education company serving students and teachers in PreK through grade 12, adult learners, and readers of all ages by providing a variety of books, print, and electronic learning materials, assessments, and professional development programs to 120,000 schools in the US and countless others around the world. Since its establishment in 1921, Harcourt Assessment has helped students and educators succeed by being a provider of quality assessments, efficient testing procedures and a source of reliable information in the assessment field.
BUSINESS PROBLEM
Harcourt needed to improve their customer experience, maintain a competitive edge and reduce overall costs. With a highly interactive workflow between Harcourt and its customers, it was essential to eliminate manual processes that were both error-prone and required expensive cycle times, and to more efficiently manage multiple customized applications.
SOLUTION
Harcourt’s strategy was to become an On Demand Business and go to market with an online B2B and B2C portal interface that provided a more efficient user experience and a modern electronic form of customer communication, document management and order processing.
Prolifics’ portal experts first built a proof-of-concept to market the concept to customers and internal stakeholders before building Harcourt Specturm, a strategic application based on WebSphere Portal. Using an ASP model, Harcourt was able to customize, personalize and brand each view specifically to a particular school or district while keeping the individual data separate and secure. Harcourt Spectrum will grow to become commerce-enabled accepting on-line payments with WebSphere Commerce, and to have online reporting and collaborative capabilities.
With the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, states are required to demonstrate school performance through annual assessments. With Harcourt Spectrum, Harcourt customers can easily enter and administrate assessment information and personalize data on test booklets through a unified view that gathers related data from multiple sources and provides schools with powerful self-service capabilities. Harcourt is now able to project and fulfill test orders, tracking them through their lifecycle, as well as reduce operational costs by automating and streamlining processes and integrating disparate systems. In the coming year, Harcourt Spectrum will be rolled out to over 20 state customers and thousands of catalog customers.
The Prolifics team—comprised of WebSphere Architects, Portal Architects, Human Interface Specialists, J2EE Developers and Workflow Designers—provided the expert guidance required to make Harcourt Spectrum a success.
"Using WebSphere Portal, the Prolifics team was instrumental in helping us deliver Harcourt Spectrum—providing our customers with the most secure, scalable and reliable platform for student assessments."
— Lisa Edwards, Director, Business and Administrative Systems