Insys implements a user-friendly Access program for Protekon staff

Protekon (Pty) Ltd KwaZulu Natal office, a subsidiary of TransNet Ltd, which applies its skills to the development and renewal of fixed assets in the fields of railway, port and related engineering, recently upgraded their financial system at both their Durban and Richards Bay offices, from a D-Base system to Platinum for Windows 4.6 (PFW), which runs on Scalable SQL 7.0. This transformation now enables the company to integrate their Project Costing system with their financial system.

The new system enables captured information from the financial applications to be automatically updated in the Project Costing system, with the added benefit of minimising workloads, whilst creating better financial control over individual projects. The upgraded system also provides the advantage of breaking down total income and expenses on each project to a transaction level.

The Insys Development Department also wrote a unique Access Program for Protekon staff, which enables them to capture their own timesheets directly into the database, and allows them to view the information from within the PFW Project costing module. A timesheet program replaced the manual timesheet system, which could only be filled-in and captured into the system by one person.

Protekon`s specially customised reports make use of two report writing tools, the FRx report writer, that is used for financial information such as Income Statements, and the Crystal Reports, that enables reports to be produced from any table within a database. This streamlined process has enabled both Protekon offices to deliver their financial reports to Head Office as one combined regional office. "This implementation has enabled us to become much more efficient in the way we operate, as well as allowing us to mange better the projects in which we are involved", said Mark Ebelthite, the Financial Manager at Protekon.

A further implementation is planned for Cape Town in March 2000.