Turn Green Screens into Automation on the IBM i

Do you have a bottleneck in data entry? Are you manually entering data through the green screen and experiencing data accuracy errors?

And, don’t you have better things for your expensive administrators to do anyway?

Let’s explore how we can reduce the burden of data entry involved in inputting data into your IBM i systems…

If you just want to check out the demonstration of iKeyer, you can view the shorter video at the bottom of this post.

Automating data entry with iKeyer

I’m going to give you an insight into how business use technology from Utilities 400 to improve both the accuracy and speed of formerly manual processes, saving your business time and money while improving data accuracy too – it’s all rather good and it’s within a product called iKeyer – no, not flatpack furniture from Sweden, but a virtual terminal for automated data entry into the IBM i via the green [5250] screen.

So, how does it work? Well, iKeyer is a server side application that picks parsed and stored data [on the IBM i] and then enters this, with validation, via a 5250 session. It can be triggered or called from your RPG programs and integrates seamlessly with Utilities 400 data import tool, iRoute.

 

And, how do you create an automation… well, in one of two ways, you can record your keystrokes and then customise using calls from the file in which you want to upload or you can use just use the powerful but simple to use script editor demonstration in the video to create automations for a multitude of inputs with accommodation for variables such as date range formatting and the like.

How will this save you money? Well, here’s a quick example that you can extrapolate for your own purposes.

 

The cost of manual data entry

Let’s say that we’re an SME business that has a number of manual data entry tasks.

These task are spread across 6 employees from different departments including accounts, warehouse, quality, manufacturing and even IT.

On average, each employee is completing about 30 minutes of input per day, so across the business we’re looking at about 3 hours per day. That’s not too unreasonable right, you may even feel that this is a conservative estimate? But let’s add it up very simply so you can apply the same principles to your business.

So, if my sums are right, the total for the six employees would come in at 15 hours per week of manual data entry.

Let’s say they’re on a basic wage of £12 per hour. That’s £36 a day or £180 per week. On the basis of a four-week month, we’ve £720 per month. Leading to a total human resource cost of over £8,640 per year just to maintain the status-quo… at a conservative estimate.

I wonder what the costs would be like in your business?

And these ongoing costs DO NOT account for the cost of data quality and the underlying data cleansing costs these may add too.

You see, quality errors come in many guises.

A report commissioned by Experian found that the most common data errors encountered in business come in the form of incomplete or missing data with out-dated, duplicate and typo errors coming in 2nd to 4th respectively.

Each represented a REAL cost to the business depending up the nature and significance of the error.

I wonder how would a data quality error such as these impact a process or department within your business?

What is the REAL cost of these manual processes for you and how do they impact your day to day operation?

What would it mean to your business if:

• We could replace expensive human resource and repurpose this resource for less menial tasks?
• Manual processes were replaced with automated procedures that ran 24×7, 365 days per year?
• We could speed up the data input tasks exponentially?
• We could do all this without sacrificing data quality?… Or indeed, improve it greatly?

We believe that replacing manual data input would remove these problems.

 

How to automate your data entry on th IBM i

So how do we go about gaining these automation benefits. What would we need?

Well, first and foremost, we need a system fit for our enterprise system. Therefore our first stipulation is that it be an IBM i native solution.

Secondly, we need a solution that provides intelligence. Not just a dumb terminal following a series of instructions; a solution that will read the screen… just like a human would, then depending upon what’s displayed will act accordingly.

But intelligence shouldn’t mean it’s overly complicated and need an expert coder to implement. No, it should have the ability to record input sessions for quick set-up then have the functionality to edit these sessions to add rules and parameters via an intuitive, effortless script.

And all this technology should be affordable with a quick return on investment because let’s face it, this solution must address ALL the issues AND add value to constitute an easy business decision.

iKeyer is the answer.

Look at iKeyer as a virtual terminal that uses AI instead of human resource to enter all the data into the green screen.

And being an AI, it brings with it performance and automation offering the input potential of many humans as it adds the intelligence needed to read the screen and make decisions based upon what it sees.

Because as you enter data into the green screen, the program responds and displays data, a window or new screen depending upon the what’s been entered.

So let’s say we’re entering data from an invoice we’ve received into our ERP. No problem…Until we realise that the data we’ve received has the date in American format.

On submission, a pop up window is displayed with… ‘input value field not recognised’ or some kind of text as equally helpful. We’d hope that a human would be able to pick up on this and with a modicum of intelligence, be able to turn the day and month input characters around to reflect the UK date/time formatting.

With iKeyer, you get this same intelligence. We’re able to look and accommodate for these idiosyncrasies. Be it a data range, an existence check, or some other variable… we can add intelligence that will automatically correct or – depending upon the error displayed on the screen – will correct or add the appropriate data or commands accordingly.

So, that (I hope) provides a grounding on what iKeyer is and (and more importantly) does! But as the old adage goes, the proof is in the pudding.

Automating Data Entry – iKeyer Demo

Here’s Steve to show you how it works through a demonstration:

If you’d like more information, or a trial, on iKeyer, please don’t hesitate to contact me.