General Electric - Financial Calculators

Challenge

The development team was tasked with developing small, portable, cross-platform calculators to assist GE Financial in educating employees about the advantages of investing in retirement.
 

Solution

Our solution was the development of calculators using internet technologies that could run within a web browser and allow easy access through the corporations intranet. We developed HTML/CSS/JavaScript calculators with one calculator that first used perl to calculate the 401(k) calculations. After several deployments we converted the middleware scripts into ColdFusion and PHP.
 

Results

The calculators were used within the human resources department of the client's intranet system. The client attributed a 5% increase in employee signups to the new educational tools.
 

Robert's Thoughts

The calculator project was my first foray into complex JavaScript scripting. Prior to this project I had programmed simple mouse over scripts and window popup functions. But this project allowed our team to learn JavaScript to manage variables across multiple pages, application state, and calculate average probability of savings for employees using several algorithms. We used design patterns for this project that included a basic MVC model and a dynamic glossary using arrays and searching methods.