Creating an Earned Value
Reporting System with PHP
Tim West
Scott Hathaway
Bell Helicopter Textron, Inc.

About Us
 More than 28 years of combined industry experience
 Created intuitive, easy to use delivery methods (including
dashboards, spreadsheets, reports, and graphs) for many
companies and universities, highlighting many different kinds
of information, including cost and schedule information
 Supported thousands of users
 Earned a living with PHP for 10 years plus
 Automated many tasks and reports, saving millions of $

Bell Helicopter Goodies to Give Away
This is our shameless attempt to get you to
give us good evaluations :)
Speaking of evaluations, please be sure to
fill out the evaluation card and turn it in at the
back.

What is Earned Value Management?

Have a Plan – What did I say I was going to do?

Execute Your Plan – What did I actually get done?

Cost – How much did I spend to do what I did?

Used by Department of Defense, Department of
Energy, National Science Foundation, NASA, and
others to manage government contracts

What Was The Need?

Application that would show data from many data
sources all in one place (MySQL, Oracle, DB2,
Mainframe, SAP, Excel, Text files, MS Access
databases, etc)

Easy to use

Provide users all they need to manage their work, all
in one place (one-stop-shop)

Provide for the needs of Executives down to
Engineers

Allow Government access into the data as
appropriate to help them manage the investment that
the US Government makes in our products

Need (continued)

Have reports that show data at all levels from
various sources that run reasonably quickly

Show important and relevant information in a
dashboard that is meaningful and sexy

Why PHP?

No cost to get going

In house expertise existed (no need to involve IT)

Fast development time (up and running in 6 weeks)

Minimal staff required

Highly scalable

Less resources needed than IT's current solution
(Java)

Challenges with using PHP

Open source not widely accepted in the defense
industry
✔
Legal issues of Intellectual Property
✔
No company supporting it
✔
Fear factor
✔
Not invented here syndrome

IT Roadblocks
✔
Lack of cooperation
✔
Lack of access to data

Why IT Does Not Like Our Application
This does not help them take over the world

Where Are We Now?

Named our application Premier

Up and running for almost 2 years now with no
downtime

1,500 plus users with 4 million hits per month
(average of about 133 hits per user per day)

Received Textron's Finance Best Practice Award
from the Textron CFO

At Aviation Week's Schedule Risk Conference,
Premier was voted the best application for tracking
schedule risks

Soon will expand to all of Textron

Premier Demo
• Detailed demo of the Premier Website

Questions?
Contact Information:
tjwest@bellhelicopter.textron.com
slhathaway@bellhelicopter.textron.com
Give Aways

We’re Hiring PHP Developers
Qualifications:
- PHP 5.x
- SQL (MySQL and Oracle knowledge preferred)
- HTML
- Javascript
- Ability to work on a team
Send Resumes to:
slhathaway@bellhelicopter.textron.com