The Illinois Tollway Earned Credit Program (ECP) allows participating firms to earn virtual credits by employing pre- screened ECP workers. Firms earn program credits based on every dollar paid to an ECP worker and earn bonus credits by sponsoring an ECP worker into a trade union. ECP credits are tracked as dollars and can be applied to future Tollway Construction project bids to lower the effective bid price giving the ECP participating contractor a competitive advantage over other bids. Participating firms must hire ECP workers from a pool of Pre-Screened ECP Job Candidates. The pre-screening process is governed by the Earned Credit Program Advisory Council. The Tollway tracks ECP information regarding participating firms, pre-screened ECP candidates, ECP worker placements, credits earned, and credits used. Participating firms are required to submit the applicable information to the Tollway in order to update their earned credit totals. The management of this program relied heavily on the use of individuals and spreadsheet tracking. The Tollway required a custom application to manage and streamline all the data and business practices to improve the efficiency of the Earned Credit Program.

Great Arc Technologies, in conjunction with Robert E. Hamilton (REH), built a custom application to manage all data and business processes related to ECP. The new application allows Tollway staff to • Manage the data in a single centralized data store • Have a standardized data structure • Enforce data entry validations and integrity checks • Automatically apply data rules • Eliminate duplicate data entry to the extent technically possible • Present the user with standardized data entry forms • Provide a means to create and update records related to ECP • Provide a means to locate and view existing ECP records • Produce predefined reports • Enter Contract and Bid Information • Create new ECP Certificates

In addition to designing and building the application, we also migrated the data from Spreadsheets, Word Documents, and PDFs into the SQL Server database that serves as the backend for the application. This process involved combing through the existing records and populating the SQL Server Database.

Ongoing work for the application includes creating new reports for data validation and historic data reporting. Additionally, Great Arc has been working with the Tollway to enter historic information (pre-2015) data into the database. This includes Employee, Payroll, Certificate, and Bid information. Additionally, there are ongoing application enhancements, one of which includes introducing a new Credit Type to the application that will allow contractors to earn additional credits for the Bid Process.