Danaher DX is a diagnostics company that employees a large, diverse work force. Consequently, Danaher employees need a tool that helps them find other employees in the company with expertise in specific fields, to collaborate with them on various business projects. Our solution is to build search engine software that allows a Danaher employee to enter a field of expertise as search input, and receive a detailed list of the Danaher employees who are most skilled in that field.

System Modification and Maintenance Guide Series

The SMM guides explain how to operate and build onto the prototype system. For example, we wrote a set of detailed instructions for backing up the database. This will guide Danaher as they independently add more features to the project.

In general, we used the idea of black box testing as a guiding principle for development. We would test our system by creating a living demo, hosted on the same website as we updated it, where members of the sponsor team could test the frontend application without knowledge of the implementation details. Thus, we were able to understand how they tried to interact with the system, what their expectations were, and whether the system met those expectations.

We used the same approach to design several application scenarios to test the accuracy of search results. For example, we would ask an employee from the sponsor team to tell us about a PubMed article which they know that they have authored. We would then enter that person's name as a search in the InDbX system, and check whether that paper is present in the search results.

• Login:
  System users and administrators have access to a special "login" page, where they need to use their Danaher accounts to log in to the tool system then get started to execute the next operations for system and information security. (Currently, this feature is not fully functional, due to reasons involving company confidentiality.)

• Search by Field:
  InDbx allows the user to search for a field of expertise: for example, if the user wants to find employees who have done research on MS2 bacteriophages, they can type in "ms2." The system will then find the Danaher employees most relevant to the query, based on PubMed papers, patents, or patent publications that they have authored.

• Search by Name:
  Alternatively, the user can search for a specific employee by name; this will allow the user to see all resources authored by that employee that the InDbX web crawlers have found. The search filters out employees who do not work in Danaher DX, so users can focus on connecting with other Danaher employees. (For example, in the screenshot you can see that Richard Pattis, a UCI professor, does not appear in the search results.)

• Collapsing multiple results:
  By default, the list of resources (patents, articles, etc.) for each employee is collapsed to only show five items. This lets the user more efficiently navigate the list. If the user needs more information for a particular employee, they can easily click the "Show More Resources" button to display the full resource list.

• Download results:
  After conducting a search, the user can download the search results as an Excel file via the "Export result to Excel File" button. This allows users to, for instance, print out the search results and review them with their peers.

• Update employee master list (admin feature):
  System administrators have access to a special "admin" page, where they can upload an Excel spreadsheet containing a list of employee names. The InDbX application will then read those names from the file, and store them in the InDbX database. This lets the web crawlers know to search for, and only for, resources authored by those employees (so if Danaher hires a new employee, an administrator can upload a new spreadsheet containing that employee's name, and they will be registered in the InDbX system). (This feature is not functional in the current demo, mainly for information security purposes.)