We
have a new tool at our disposal here in C & P. We are excited about its
potential usefulness in our accounting applications, and so we were anxious to
bring you all together this afternoon for a brief overview. Don’t worry;
we’ll have you out of here before the 5 o’clock whistle. This package allows
the programmer to develop interactive applications with user-friendly screens
for data entry. It’s called Dialog Management Services—or DMS.
First,
some background on how I got involved with DMS. This summer the Cost Accounting
section came to us with a rather desperate plea for help. One of their monthly
tasks had been preparing Journal Entry Vouchers (JEVs) for reporting to Finance.
They had been using the typewriter to prepare several hundred of these documents
each month, and since they worked with multiple carbon copies, every error was
critical.
What
made the situation worse was that a lot of the JEV data was repetitive. I’ll
show you what I mean by that. [Slide 1] This is an example of a JEV report.
(This one happens to be quite short; but they can be much longer, up to several
pages.) When I say that a lot of the data was repetitive, I mean that, for many
JEVs, the heading, the footing, and the framework of General Ledger codes and
subcodes stayed the same from month to month. The only things that changed were
the dollar amounts. Yet, for just those changes, the entire JEV had to be
retyped every month.
So,
Cost Accounting requested a system with on-line storage for the JEV data, so
that the repetitive information could be recycled from month to month. For
changing data, as well as for the initial entry of JEV data, they needed
user-friendly preformatted screens and validity checking. Finally, they needed
to be able to draw from that on-line storage selected JEVs for printing at
various times throughout the month.
DMS,
which is relatively new within DuPont, seemed like it would address all of these
needs.
I will be using the Cost Accounting JEV system as an example as we cover the subject of DMS—what components make it up and what its capabilities are. Of course, I won’t try to cover all of the details. This will be a basic overview. ISD does offer a course on DMS, so if after today you think you may have an application for DMS, you might want to sign up for that . . .
© 1983
R. S. Maginn