Project Title: Automated Scheduling Web Services for Small and Medium Enterprises
Student: Miguel Lopez
Course: Erasmus Exchange Student

Abstract:
Rostering is a fundamental process for companies. This process allows them to
manage their resources efficiently. The most of rostering solutions work in a standalone
environment.
This project aims to give a new approach to the rostering process transforming the
standalone environment in a distributed one. Web services are the chosen technology to
transform the approach. Web services have been positioned as one of the most important
and used technologies, however the combination of rostering and web services has not been
investigated and deeply studied. This new approach pretends to create new lighter and
flexible solutions for companies without complicated installations and configurations.
The distributed approach could report several benefits to both parts, it will allow to
focus this technological area into a web 2.0 approach. The rostering companies will update
themselves into new companies full of interaction possibilities with the rest of the 2.0 world.
At the same time, the enterprise that uses the rostering service do not have to worry for the
maintenance and the updates any longer. Rosters can be obtained everywhere 24/7, this
improves the value of the company and the relationships with the employees.
At the same time, the project aims to show how SMEs can use new technologies as
web services without spending loads of money and resources. The proper usage of these
technologies could reward significant benefits to SMEs.
Different applications have been created for the project. These applications have
been configured in different ways to give a wide vision and better understanding of the
approach?s performance. The configurations are focused in the type of web service used
SOAP, REST) and in the security and its different possibilities.
The project is a conceptual test of how this new approach would work. The project
aims to highlight the strong and weak points of the approach and settle a foundation for
future projects in this area.
The project successes showing the weak points of the approach. Surprisingly and
contrary to expectations the problems appear retrieving the external company the necessary
data for the roster. The expectations were that the system's bottleneck was into the rostering
process which usually is a heavy load for the system. The results of the project show how the
bottleneck is located when external enterprise's data is being retrieved. This highlights the
fundamental issue of this new approach: a customized system for each company with the
same global system for all of them. This means that despite having a global system working
with web services, this is not valid for all the companies hence it has to be modified and
customized for each company. Collaboration between companies becomes essential with
this new approach. This complicates the initial idea and change the focus of the rostering
company, which needs to be transformed into a web company.