External Awards and File Parser
Posted by jeggent on December 22, 2010
2011 – The Year of External Awards and File Parser
Not very catchy is it? I’ll have to work on the marketing aspects of it, but the premise is sound! 2010 (post upgrade) was the year of the 3C Engine and Population Selection. Those tools have had and will continue to have a big impact on improving our processing efficiency. The next step to enhance those processes now using 3C Engine with Population Selection is to fully automate the process by adding a COMGEN step. I have yet to convert a process to use COMGEN but hope to very soon.
We will continue to automate processes with 3C Engine but I think the next big impact will come from further use of External Awarding. We’ve been using external awarding with fee waivers for a couple of months now and from our perspective it is going very well having improved a previously very labor intensive process. I’ll qualify that by adding that there is a meeting currently scheduled to discuss the process in which we will find out how the other effected offices perceive the change. I am now looking at using External Awarding with other award types to eliminate double entry and improve processing. We just did our first test of adding to the External Awards staging table with a File Parser File Mapping ID and I’m very happy with the results. I envision accepting award rosters delivered in Excel or sourced out of a web application that will then be seamlessly staged using this process. Setting up the File Definition was a little challenging so feel free to contact me or post something to HEUG if you’d like some further tips.
As always, good luck! And happy holidays!
**Update**
It’s only fair to point out that we received lots of great guidance about External Awards and even File Parser from our excellent consultant Jerry!