| The
MOAB Compliance Database and Application (MCDA) project was
performed for the Fruit and Vegetable Division of the USDA in
the period October, 2000-April, 2001. The work involved making revisions to
a database and application program written in Access 97 and
running on Windows NT.
The subject system failed to capture all the data needed
by users, was limited in its capabilities, and provided a set
of reports that were confusing and, in some cases, erroneous. The MCDA is the primary application used
by the MOAB Compliance group and provides automation, uniformity,
high visibility, and manageability to their work.
The MCDA
is used to manage the compliance process concerning handlers
agricultural commodities who are found to be in violation
of USDA rules. It
serves the needs of local users in addition to a number of
remote offices. The
report information is a major value of MCDA.
A significant amount of our work focused on correcting
reports and making the reports, and the dialogs for creating
them, more intelligible.
The highlights
of our work is as follows:
- We
evaluated the approximately 50 reports that were a part
of this program and which were available from two separate
interfaces. We removed those that expressed unnecessary
and redundant information and consolidated some other reports.
We corrected and revised many reports and we wrote
eight new reports. We restructured every report with a sensitivity
to clarity and good design principles.
- We
reorganized the main report interface, creating four logical
groupings and putting the reports in a consistent order. We renamed and re-captioned many reports
to accurately reflect their purpose. These changes allow users to easily and
quickly access needed information.
- We
created two special Alert reports showing cases close to
or past deadlines that are automatically emailed to the
specialists managing these cases.
The reports are personalized for a particular specialist,
showing just his cases.
An Alert report emailed to Supervisors provides the
same information on all specialists assigned to him.
- Using
capabilities of Access 97, we developed a Query and Report
Creation functionality allowing a user to use the Access
wizards to create queries and reports and save them in a
special location for later use.
We provided training to our clients on the use of
the Report Wizard and found this to be of great value to
them.
- We
created five utility tables to provide editable values for
choice list fields we added to the main form, to allow a
user to enter holidays used in calculating workdays, and
to edit values used in determining record selection for
the Alert reports.
- Numerous
errors in the original system were discovered and corrected.
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