A testimonial the Financial Systems Administrator for the City of Corvallis, Oregon provided to the Sungard PS Users’ Group (currently Superion). The following is an excerpt from an email sent to a user group of public sector software.
Overview
“Initially, we had 4 primary goals for this report management project:
- Decrease the amount of trees being killed by replacing hardcopy with PDFs.
- Ability to download spooled files to Excel, stripping out sub-totals, description lines, etc., for better/easier evaluation.
- Ability to split spooled files, most commonly by Dept, to allow them to be more easily distributed, with less paper waste.
- Better way to archive spooled files and perhaps reduce the ‘dead wood’ on the AS400 from the users that want to keep everything.
My Budget Accountants and I looked at several approaches. Their primary focus was on the Excel portion.
First of all, the installation and setup of the SpoolFlex software took about 30 minutes over the phone. At the end of the 30 minutes, I was emailing spooled files converted to PDFs all over the place. I had been assigned a project to automate the monthly distribution of Payroll Accrual Registers to a long and varied list of users and managers and to deliver to them only the portion of the report that pertained to their workgroups. Therefore, I used that project as a basis for evaluation. The next day the project was a done deal.”