Gerber Computer Services
Gerber develops payroll/HR costing application on Caché
Gerber Computer Services (GCS), an InterSystems Application Partner, has developed a payroll and HR costing for projects application based on Caché, InterSystems' post-relational database. Primary features of the application are speed and reliability through centralisation, with transactions performed over a wide area network. Initially developed for the mining sector, the application is expected to see takeup across a range of industries.
"Due to the intuitive Caché development environment and its ability to work with both relational and object data, the application was developed with a Web-based front end that can be easily deployed on any PC system," says Roux Gerber, MD of GCS. The application maintains data integrity because Caché retains data even when proper shutdown procedures have not been followed, such as in the event of power failure. Suddenly disconnected remote servers will result in little, if any, lost data and no data corruption.
Due to the application's Web-based front end, it is also suitable for IT-hostile environments, necessitating no more maintenance and support than existing Windows infrastructures would require. In tests, the application processed more than 10 000 transactions daily for 2 500 employees at eight remote locations throughout South Africa. Benefits to the mining sector, for instance, are financial control, while easing the administration burden on technical and financial staff.
"I was asked to develop a simple capturing system in one month and at the same time persuaded to use a new development environment based on Caché," says Gerber. "Opportunities presented by Caché resulted in the application being extended to include the development of a payroll, HR and costing system." At the same time, Gerber created a development wizard to further decrease development time.
The wizard creates objects for the following events and interface components:
- Menu layout;
- User access;
- Input screens;
- Print screens;
- Lookup screens; and
- Process screens
Using this wizard, Gerber developed the HR component to the system with facilities for:
- Registering new employees;
- Assigning the correct job grades and pay categories;
- Transferring employees from one site to another;
- Registering job grade changes;
- Pay category changes;
- Retrenchments; and
- Tracking costing daily
The wizard was also used to create an asset tracking and costing program for plants and required only 48 hours of development. A job ticket system with e-mail notifications, as well as production measurement for the IT department, was later added after one day of planning and without having to write any code.
"Caché allows you to perform the development while the system is live," says Gerber. "And the speed at which it executes is amazing, with queries running against as many as one billion records returning results within two seconds."
"Roux has made full use of Caché's rapid development environment which supports all the major technologies, including J2EE, .NET, Web services, SQL and XML," says Henry Adams, country manager of InterSystems SA. "Some of the features he has been able to use include automatic XML mapping, the Web services wizard, Caché Server Pages, Caché Application Tags, Hyper events and the Caché Web form wizard."
