LANSA and IBM at the HEART of HR training in Jamaica
The
HEART Trust is Jamaica's National Training Agency and a statutory organization
of the government of Jamaica. Its mission is to create the human resource
manpower that is required for the industrial development of Jamaica. HEART
trains approximately 30,000 people each year and is funded by Jamaican firms
through a special payroll levy.
HEART's LANSA based Training Information Management System (TIMS) handles hundreds of thousands of training related transactions daily and makes trainee and management information available to HEART's network of 60 offices and training centers across the island from a single AS/400. TIMS will be expanded with LANSA for the Web to provide companies with a self-service recruitment function and trainees with an online application facility. Visual LANSA is used to access statistical information by the casual internal business user.
Enos Brown, Chief Information Officer at the HEART Trust says, "The AS/400 is our platform of choice, both in terms of its optimal reliability and efficiency with which it handles a centralized database being distributed to many locations island-wide. The LANSA tool on top of that has proved ideal in being able to quickly develop a very robust application."
"The AS/400 and LANSA form a very cost effective environment. We have only five developers who do AS/400 software development and maintenance and don't need a dedicated resource to look after the machine itself."
The Challenge
National Training Agency
Enos explains, "HEART stands for Human Employment and Resource Training. We are industry led and funded by a payroll tax paid by the same industries. We have established industry lead groups who inform us what they would require in a worker. This we translate into training programs."
"We provide actual training but we also coordinate the training that is provided by other technical vocational education providers. We create the curriculum, training programs and standards, which we then make available to both public and private providers of training. We provide monitoring, testing and national certification services."
"Our organization has a very distributed nature. We wanted to be able to provide a complete service at any one of our 50 training locations. This demands that we must have efficient island-wide access to our critical information system, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week."
"One of the additional difficulties which we face in Jamaica is the high cost of bandwidth. We need an application which functions efficiently with low bandwidth speeds, often in the 56K range. The combination of the AS/400 and LANSA provide very acceptable real-time access in our high volume and low bandwidth environment. It is the database power of the AS/400, the design of the database and the efficiency of the LANSA application that optimizes the throughput of the data."
"All in all we have a quite demanding environment which performs very well on our AS/400 with LANSA. When we extend TIMS to the Web, we want to keep that same performance, availability and security."
The Solution
"TIMS tracks the complete training life cycle of our students. This includes
information from the point of training application, through to entrance testing,
placement in a training institution, monitoring the daily attendance at the
institution and their performance. The system calculates and transfers the
stipend to trainees by electronic bank transfer. The system also monitors the
information that is required for final testing, certification and job
placement."
"We use the system also to assist in the collect our trace-study information. We track trainees for up to a year after their training, to find out where they are working and to what extend they have benefited from the training. This allows us to review how effective and efficient we have been in terms of equipping the labor force."
"TIMS handles hundreds of thousands transactions a day. Each activity, even as minute as a person attending class, is captured by our system."
"We want to expand our system to the Web starting with the Job Placements module. Currently our staff enters the desired employee profile, after speaking with the potential employer. We let the LANSA application search for the best matching candidates and send their profiles to the potential employer. The Web will provide companies with a more efficient self-service recruitment function. The other function that we are looking to extend to the Web is the remote registration of our trainees. This would allow them to register for their courses from home, as opposed to having to visit the institution."
The Benefits
Enos continues, "Our IT department is responsible for supporting our internal
systems, as well as our training delivery system. We have in excess of 5,000
computer devices that we maintain. Our total IT department consists of sixteen
people, but there are only five people assigned to LANSA development. The same
five people also support our packaged information systems and they keep our
AS/400 up and running. That is an amazingly low number of staff for the
operation we run."
"From a management perspective, it is the fact that with LANSA we are able to roll out and modify our application in record time compared to the old RPG environment. At the same time the platform is robust."
Leecep Sterling, System Development Manager, comments, "LANSA is very easy to use. We can easily create a system in a short time. When we want to create a new form or prompt, we just pick up a template, create the file and it is finished. LANSA is flexible in doing almost everything we want it to do."
Enos continues "The single LANSA skill set means that I can expand our AS/400 solution to the Web and client server with the same five developers who have years of expertise with the business functionality of our information systems. I don't have to bring in new people that I have to train from scratch."
"Our staff, with green-screen development skills, could in the matter of a few days develop a transaction processing Web site using LANSA for the Web. Learning to develop client server applications using Visual LANSA was just as easy. The training intervention was minimal and all of a sudden, I have multi-skilled resources that I can use, not only in our traditional environment, but also in an environment of emerging technologies, whether it is the Web or client server."
"It is also very good from the standpoint of our developers, because they experience a lot of professional growth and development."
"Over the years we have grown in terms of our use of information systems and in the volume of transactions. The AS/400 and LANSA environment is very scalable, which gives us the confidence to manage any future growth with our existing infrastructure. I don't see that we could have achieved what we have achieved, without the combination of the AS/400 and LANSA."
"With LANSA we are able to roll out and modify our application in record time"
Conclusion
Enos concludes "Jamaica sees human resource development as being one of the
critical elements to move us to the point where we can compete in this
increasingly global marketplace. It has been our organization that has been
mandated with providing that work force preparation."
"From the beginning HEART Trust has recognized that information communication technology was going to be critical to our success. Therefore we made IT an integrated part of our training programs. But we also optimized the use of IT internally to ensure our own efficiency and effectiveness."
"LANSA and the AS/400 are critical to our success in manpower preparation, because they are the backbone of our trainee information system which is the lifeblood of our organization. How effectively we manage that is how effectively we can deliver on our mandate. Our information management system provides a key resource in allowing us to do what we do more effectively."
"The AS/400 is a strong database machine. It does what it is supposed to do and it is always available. We take it very much for granted that the AS/400 just runs. The box doesn't attract any attention to itself. The cost of ownership is very low. The Windows environment that we use for training delivery needs more attention to keep it up and running."
"We are going to continue to work with what has worked with us. We do appreciate LANSA's cross platform deployment, but there is no justification for us to switch platforms."
"LANSA and the AS/400 are critical to our success in manpower preparation"
Company and System Information
- The HEART Trust is Jamaica's National Training Agency. The HEART Trust invests funds derived from a special payroll levy into human resource development and training. Programs are aimed at developing a world class workforce. HEART Trust employs 1,100 staff, the vast majority of them involved in direct training delivery.
- For more information visit www.heart-nta.org
- HEART Trusts uses an AS/400 model 720-2061 for all its internal information systems and development. There are approximately 300 internal users active on average. The number of average Web visitors is not yet available.