Database Applications

Running head: DATABASE APPLICATIONS

Database Applications

University of Phoenix Online

CIS/319 Computers and Information Processing

Database Applications

The company that I work for makes extensive use of databases and other applications that are based on database technologies and theories. The extensive use of databases throughout the entire organization, in theory, will save time, money, and manpower. My company uses several different types of databases and different database applications based on the estimated size of the database once all the data has been entered and allowing for future growth. The company standard for the majority of databases is FileMaker Pro by FileMaker. The company also makes uses of other databases such as Oracle and Lotus Approach, although I am not very familiar with the latter. Since the company also provides employees with Microsoft Office Professional on their work computers, many people also use Microsoft Access for smaller, inter-departmental and personal database needs.

One of the newest database applications that I use most often is our new timekeeping system that we call APEX. In the past, all employees had to manually log the hours they worked on each assigned contract and had to ensure that they were billing the appropriate number of hours to the correct account numbers associated with each contract. Since the company I work for is a defense contractor, our charges and billable hours are always subject to an audit by the federal government. One of our major goals is to make sure that we are always one hundred percent accountable in this area without any errors. If major discrepancies were found with our billing process it could cause the contract to be investigated and possibly canceled or at least delayed. Although it has taken many years and great expense to finally move the entire company over to a computerized timekeeping system, the savings both in time and energy, as well as the accuracy of our time reporting is a reflection of a well implemented system. One of the major problems that we used to have with a manual, handwritten time card system was trying to determine the correct number of hours to bill to each specific contract. Sometimes we have hundreds of people working on the same contract but from different locations. For example, we might be working on a contract to build a new missile and we will have people in Massachussetts, Arizona, Alabama, and California all working on different components of the missile, but everyone charges their hours to the same contract account number. At the end of each week, everyone must submit their time cards and the corporate accounting office would have to wait for all time cards from each location to arrive and start totaling the number of hours to bill to each contract. The problem would get even worse when many of those people would work on multiple contracts at the same time. To add even more confusion, if some of the people had to attend some sort of internal company training, that would have to be billed to another account number. This whole process not only made it difficult to determine how much time to bill each customer for, but it also made it extremely difficult to figure out how much to pay each employee and which account to take that money from. It was also quite difficult for the employee to keep up with all of the different accounting codes and numbers for each of the contracts that they worked on. Another big problem that was caused by the manual system was the time that it took to get time cards from employees that work at international locations, especially remote locations that do not have regular mail service. The old system required that the time cards be received by the corporate accountants within a certain period of time. This meant that overseas and remote location employees often had to make special trips to someplace where they could send their time cards using an express mail service such as Federal Express. This meant additional overhead costs to the company because express delivery from a foreign country can be extremely expensive. The new system can be accessed over the Internet and