7 years of experience creating ad hoc reports from FOCUS for IBM Mainframe, a major fourth-generation language, to:
- provide information from LMS
- interface information from LMS, FAM (Financial Aid Management system), SR (Student Records system), and/or the Housing database
- interface LMS data with PC applications, for various uses, via download
- An application of this procedure retrieves over 1,000 possible candidate data records per run from LMS. These records are imported into MS Access. In MS Access they are formatted and subsequently uploaded to the National Student Loan Clearinghouse. The Clearinghouse then provides student loan deferment documentation. This process greatly reduces man-hours spent obtaining this documentation on an individual basis.
- assist other personnel in the OSSA (Office of Scholarships and Student Aid) and, occasionally, other campus offices in the creation of FOCUS ad hoc reports from various systems
- update data in LMS
- A major timesaving application
of this function occurred in the testing and upgrade of LMS to include new composite data fields for federally required reporting to NSLDS (the National Student Loan Database System). During collaborative testing by the NSLDS vendor, LMS vendor, AIS (Administrative Information Systems) programmer, and me, I created and used FOCUS reports to isolate and analyze submission data that would not pass NSLDS edits due to programming errors or inadequacies. This information was passed to the appropriate vendors for software corrections. After the final software version was installed into production, I created FOCUS procedures to build composite data files that were uploaded into LMS to populate the new fields. This process saved not only months of work in gathering the data and entering it manually, but also eliminated countless errors which would have resulted from manual data entry.
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