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Another corporate consolidation project involved automating
the corporate consolidation process. Before NTS' work, the
corporate consolidation process was manual, requiring corporate
personnel to examine cost center reports and determine the
appropriate location of transactions to appropriate accounts. The
automating of the corporate consolidation process through SDM
involved four or five technicians conducting extensive testing over
a 2-year period.
Another project with respect to the G/L involved the on-line
component of the system. Every evening, the mainframe computer
went off-line and updated the G/L system with transactions that had
occurred during the day. However, often during the day the
corporate controller's office or other Norwest personnel needed
access to the G/L system to obtain on-line updates for ad hoc
reporting. This presented a problem because the updating occurred
at night--whereas users often needed real-time updates during the
day. To accommodate the users' needs, NTS developed a "shadow
file" system, which was a secondary set of files, copied from the
primary files, that could be used for off-line reporting. As a
result of the shadow file system, the users had access to shadow
files with real-time updates.
The shadow file system presented technical issues for NTS.
The shadow file system worked on a DB2 database system which, at
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