TRAINING AND TESTING

THE SITUATION
LMN Corporation trains and certifies operators for chemical plants, processing plants, automated manufacturing facilities, and power generation plants (including nuclear facilities). LMN also provides operators to industry on a contractual basis.

Clients generally send their students or certification applicants to LMN's facilities. There are advantages and disadvantages to doing this. It allows LMN to closely control and restrict the testing and learning environment s to prevent distractions, cheating, and theft of its testing and instructional materials. By the same token, however, it deprives LMN of the ability to closely simulate the client's actual environment, which detracts from the quality of the experience for the client. LMN would like to be able to offer the option to provide their testing and instruction at the clients facilities, because it makes more sense logistically to send one or two instructors to a client site than to send twenty students to the LMN facilities and because the classroom environment would more closely match the client's real-world setting. However, LMN would not have exclusive control of the client's environment to prevent copying of their materials to a USB device, a network drive, or the Internet; to detect cheating by Google access or by some other means; or to play back student activities at some later point to analyze the effectiveness of the syllabus. The expense and labor required to re-create LMN's in-house security environment would be prohibitive to the client.

CURRENT TECHNOLOGY
There are a number of hardware and software options which can secure, record, or constrict and environment for testing or instruction. They tend to be non-portable, require skilled set-up, and/or have licensing restrictions preventing repeated installation and removal on dissimilar equipment. They also tend to be expensive and highly specialized for a given discipline.

THE VIEWSENDER SOLUTION
The patent-pending architecture of the viewSender Agent can capture all of the activity on a computer regardless of the hardware of the specific computer on which it is run. Therefore, Agents can be easily and quickly be configured and installed on multiple machines without changes to hardware or software already installed on the target computers. The Agent Configuration Utility makes creation of bulk Agents painless. Agents are licensed to the Agent configuration utility rather than the computers on which they are installed, and a complete network can be set up in minutes. The Agents can report to a Server already existing at a central location (such as one at LMN's facilities) or a Server can easily be set up specific to a given set of Agents. Agents are very inexpensive, and are typically licensed in bulk for even greater economy.

The viewSender Agent does not block access, but will reliably report file copying to or from anywhere, Internet access, e-mail and messenger communications, and any other activity on the computer, and is therefore perfect for monitoring testing environments. Its capture and playback facilities are ideal for replaying a sequence of training steps to analyze a student's performance and to teach. viewSender can ensure the integrity of the testing experience for the test-giver and test-taker.

Note: Separate and apart from the topics of testing and training, viewSender is the essential complementary software for chemical plants, processing plants, automated manufacturing facilities, power generation plants (including nuclear facilities) and other critical monitored environments (it can even monitor closeted monitoring computers with no human attendee). Where humans are tasked to monitor a plant or production environment, viewSender provides captured data necessary to evaluate operator performance, do post-mortem analyses on failures, and audit monitoring practices and personnel .

It can also be used as a secondary or backup monitoring system - popular plant-monitoring systems like Honeywell's HMI Web can produce text messages and notifications on screen, which can then be picked up by viewSender. viewSender can itself be set up to send notifications of its own so that when a text warning has been ignored by an operator, other staff can be notified.

As an example, consider what happened a few years ago at one of the largest chemical processing plants in the United States. Plant operators (the employees responsible for watching the software that monitors equipment for failure or hazardous situations) are notorious for detesting nagging or chattering alarms (alarms that when they occur tend to repeat themselves). Generally, they will ignore them (the shepherd crying "Wolf!" problem, sometimes also known as Three Mile Island). When audible alarms were added to the software and sophisticated logic was added to prevent turning the sound off, the operators simply clipped the wires to the external speaker attached to the wall (or in another room, they used a razor blade to remove the inner speaker cone and the drive magnet - the speaker was disabled, but the vandalism wasn't obvious on casual inspection). The problem? An unexpected alarm occurred when the operators were not paying attention to the screen, and sound was the only means the operator would have had to learn of the problem. The plant did not blow up, but shutting down and restarting the ethylene cracker cost several days and millions of dollars.