Re: Where would you start?

["Booth Martin" <Booth@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Here's my 2 cents. 
 
Faced with the same problem but on a much smaller scale we used subfiles
with columns for: proposed budget, this period actual, this period budget,
last period actual, last period budget, and 2nd last period actual. Those 6
columns seemed to do what was needed. Later on we added a VARPG element and
the operating people liked that a lot.
 
 
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Booth Martin http://www.MartinVT.com
Booth@xxxxxxxxxxxx
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-------Original Message-------
 
From: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Date: 11/25/2003 7:13:50 AM
To: midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Where would you start?
 
Hey all,
 
We've got a nightmare of a manual process that we'd like to maybe improve -
automate - web enable - streamline, and I thought I'd throw it out to the
brain trust for ideas. I'm not looking for a design, but if you were
going to build such a beast, what tools or combination of tools would you
start with?
 
This is what we're doing now (please, no laughing ;)
 
Fiscal period budget and actual GL figures for every restaurant (more than
300) are manually down loaded from iseries packaged DB2 accounting database
into excel spreadsheets, massaged to look nice and then sent to the store's
district managers (around 40). The DstMs fax the spreadsheets to the
stores, and store GMs write budget figures on the paper and fax back to the
DstMs.
The DstMs changes, approves or disaproves the figures, faxes them back to
the GMs for FYI, then key the numbers into the spread sheet.
They are then emailed to the Div Managers (around 15 DivMs ) for
approval/rejection, and ultimately emailed back to corporate accounting,
where they are loaded one by one into an MS Access db, reformatted to look
like the accounting package's 'external feed' file, uploaded to the 400 and
fed back into the G/L system.
 
This happens twice a year. Ugly huh?
 
We use Notes/Domino corporate wide for email - the restaurants use only the
iNotes web client. The store PCs are bare bones - just the software needed
to run the POS software and satellite links to our network - with browser
access to a few small html, Java, perl, RPG-CGI and Domino apps. They
don't have MSOffice. All involved parties have Notes identities.
 
I guess my biggest questions come in how to deploy the data for intense
data entry and number crunching, without distributing spreadsheets? Domino
is great for the collaborative (promote, demote, approval, rejection)
aspects of the problem, but not IMO very good at data entry or number
crunching. My thoughts go to some kind of domino/java/websphere hybrid?
or maybe even some visual RPG?
 
Pretty much anything is on the table, as long as it's (my hope) iseries
based. It's tough for me to get my arms and brain around this one, so any
good ideas would be greatly appreciated.
 
Thanks,
 
Rick