CSE498, Collaborative Design, Spring 2014
Computer Science and Engineering
Michigan State University

Ford Motor Company is an iconic American brand that has been producing automobiles for 110 years. Ford’s workforce of 170,000 employees produced 2.5 million vehicles in 2013.

In order to run a large global company, Ford relies heavily on structured business processes. Many of these processes are computerized and require supervisors to review and approve actions or requests. Examples include: employee time keeping, purchasing, expense reporting and product tracking.

While Ford’s current approval systems do work, they require supervisors to use many different systems to approve different types of requests. Furthermore, these systems do not support mobile computing, which is common in the modern workplace.

Our Mobile Approver system replaces these disparate approval systems with a single, unified approval portal. Ford supervisors can approve any and all types of actions or requests simply by logging into a single system using their Ford credentials.

Once a supervisor is logged in, our system retrieves all actions and requests that have pending approvals and displays them in a single, easy-to-use interface. Supervisors can quickly approve or reject requests, providing comments when needed.

Our Mobile Approver system supports all modern web browsers and runs on desktops, laptops, tablets and phones.

Devices with cameras such as tablets and phones can use QR codes to interface with Ford’s inventory tracking system.

Our system is implemented using HTML5, Java, Spring MVC, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft SharePoint and JavaScript.