History
The idea behind AccuTrack came to life
in 1994 when Jay, one of Engineerica Systems'
founders, was studying for his Master's in Computer Engineering
at the University of Central Florida. Jay also worked
as a tutor in the Academic Resource Center. At the
time, the staff at the tutoring center was spending almost
2 weeks at the end of each semester
manually tabulating usage data from sign-in sheets.
As you can guess, this was a time-consuming and painful process. Knowing that he had a strong background in computers,
the director of the center asked Jay if he could write
a program to automate the data reporting process.
With assistance of his Engineerica partners, Jay designed
and wrote a sign-in program for the tutoring center.
This program was written in Clipper and ran on a 386
computer using MS-DOS.
The tutoring center used this sign-in
program for a few years and it made the process of tracking
sign-ins much easier. By observing how the program
worked in real usage situations and how students and
staff interacted with it, Jay envisioned many improvements.
In 1997 the program was re-written for Windows 95 using
MS Visual Basic and Access. The enhanced sign-in program
looked much better that its predecessor and included
new features such as the ability to report on visitor's
demographics.
Shortly after developing the UCF software,
Engineerica decided to take the concept to a commercial
level, and AccuTrack was born. The
software was completely re-written using Visual FoxPro. It took many months
of hard work to create and market the new software.
Finally, in April of 1998 AccuTrack got its first customer
when the University of West Florida ordered a copy.
Over the years, many other colleges and universities followed.
As more centers examined the software,
administrators from these center requested
new features. For example, Pima Community College and
Laney College introduced the appointments scheduling
module. Pima Community College also added the media
checkouts module. De Anza College ordered the staff
work-hours tracking module. The idea for the traffic
analysis module came from The University of Akron. Appointments
and no-show reporting came from Loyola Marymount University.
Many other colleges and universities contributed by
giving feedback which went into constantly improving the software.
Of course the developers and AccuTrack employees also contributed with their
own ideas.
As a result, AccuTrack grew from a simple
sign-in program to comprehensive learning center software.
Today
hundreds of learning centers in colleges
and universities across the U.S. and abroad depend
on AccuTrack for collecting their data and managing
their day-to-day operations.
Of course, the best way
to know the software is to try it out yourself. This
site will let you know how to
get your free evaluation copy to test and see what
AccuTrack can do for your center.
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