Title:

Chartered Accountants Firm

Description:

Consulted to KPMG and worked on the STARS system. This system generates sample letters each month (around thirty thousand) which are sent all over Australia by field staff and monitored by an internal operations group. Information is collected and stored about each letter such as day of posting, number of delivery days and state of letter upon arrival. This information is used to produce reports to Australia Post on the efficiency of the postal delivery system. Main work carried out on the STARS system was:

Upgrading the system from a SunOS 4.1.3 and Oracle 6.0 environment to a Solaris 2.3 and Oracle 7.0 environment. During this process many of the common routines were redesigned and written in PL/SQL to form a database package and the forms and PRO*C programs were modified to use the packaged procedures. Extensive testing was carried out on the upgraded system to satisfy internal audit standards.

Designed, developed and tested enhancements to the STARS system. This included a batch reporting mode whereby users could request various reports with particular parameters and run these reports overnight to free computational and printing services during the day.

Created Postscript copies of the Xerox forms used in batch reporting and generalized the printing routines to produce Postscript in addition to Xerox UDK. This enabled the STARS system to generate Postscript reports that were identical to the Xerox reports and could be downloaded by Australia Post and printed on their Postscript printers nationwide.

Implemented the bulk sample type that creates bulk lodgments (around three and a half thousand letters of varying sizes and letter types) which are mailed from a single mail center and distributed evenly around Australia. This sample type tests the efficiency of a single mail center.

The system is written in C and PRO*C on a Sparc 20 machine running Solaris 2.4 and Oracle 7.0.

KPMG project required us to work on Open Solutions and develop a back end system for their International Monetary Exchange system. The latter runs at the various branches of a bank on PC/Windows machines connected to an NT Server. Communication with the head office is done via files. Our role was to design, implement and module test a system for coordinating the transfer of files between the head office and its branches.

The system consisted of a number of co-operating processes. One process monitored the incoming directory for files sent from the branches and created child processes to process these files. Another process monitored the outgoing directory and started child processes for sending files to a particular branch. Another process periodically monitored the master database for new information (e.g. exchange rates) and created files for sending this information to each branch.

Numerous shell scripts were written for starting/stopping the back end system and also for monitoring the processes and recovering whenever a process ended abnormally. A number of common routines were placed in a Windows DLL and called from the Visual Basic front-end.

The system was written in C, PRO*C on a Sparc 20 workstation running Solaris 2.v.