Sample Application: Anonymous Benchmarking

In a services organization, utilization is a valuable metric for managing the business. A simple definition of utilization is the number of hours worked, typically hours billable to the client, divided by the total number of hours in a time period, expressed as a percentage.

In this section, the Services Manager sample application is extended with a Visualforce page that performs a basic utilization calculation between two dates. To calculate billable hours worked, it queries the Timecard custom object. For available hours, it uses a built-in Apex function for date arithmetic to compute the number of working hours between the two dates.

Integration comes into the picture with the addition of anonymous benchmarking. Imagine an independent organization that collects and analyzes the performance data of services companies. Companies submit their anonymized metrics and compare their performance with that of other companies in their industry. For the Services Manager sample application, you have access to a fictional benchmarking organization reachable through a SOAP Web service call.

The remainder of the section describes the design and implementation of the utilization page, controller, and integration to the anonymous benchmarking SOAP Web service. It is divided into the following subsections:

Visualforce page design—Build a simple Visualforce page to capture the start and end dates of the utilization calculation, and display the results.

Visualforce controller design—Develop a controller to retrieve the billable hours worked and the available hours, and perform the utilization calculation.

Integrating the SOAP Web service—Add code to the controller to call out to the anonymous benchmarking SOAP Web service to share the results of the utilization calculation.

Sample implementation—Examine sample code for the utilization page and controller. Try this code in its entirety, copy portions of it, or contrast it with your own implementation.