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The Dominion Post, Monday July 1st 1996, by Neshan Dias
When the Bank of New Zealand decided to offer 4,500 customers ATM cards at the Mystery Creek Trade fair in Hamilton last month, it had a small
problem - how to generate so many cards quickly. BNZ wanted the cards pre-printed, so that when customers visited the booth, they could simply
walk away with a card, if they wanted one, says Project Manager Aaron Milne.
Creating ATM cards requires entering customer details into an interbank computer system through a dumb terminal which in this case would have
meant some serious work for BNZ's data entry clerks.
Wellington based software and management consulting firm, Sysware Consulting, developed software to assist. With only ten days to generate
4500 cards, Sysware consultants set up a PC based scripting program to read the customer information off BNZ's customer management system,
and then generate a script that would feed this information into the interbank system through the terminal automatically.
Sysware senior consultant Charles Chinnaiyah says that Sysware generated a program that would input this data, as if a clerk was sitting
and typing it in. "As far as the mainframe was concerned, it had no idea whether this information was being keyed in manually or automatically",
says Mr Chinnaiyah.
This method was ten times faster, says Mr Milne. It takes a clerk one minute to enter the details of a customer, while the scripting program
was entering ten customers per minute, he says. In fact, the information got fed in so quickly, that at one stage the mainframe was having
trouble coping with the rapid rate of entry, says Mr Chinnaiyah.
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