Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, February 25, 1995 TAG: 9502270007
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: A6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MATT CROWDER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
A computer class at Virginia Western Community College is working outside the classroom, helping a dairy replace an outdated billing system its customers say has turned sour.
The class, System Analysis and Design II taught by Sharri Russell, is helping Valley Rich Dairy merge onto the information superhighway.
Half of the group is helping the company install and use Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), enabling it to communicate online with customers and producers.
Valley Rich has about 7,000 customers, "from warehouses that buy a trailer-load every day way down to little grocery stores that buy two gallons a week," said controller Roger Sanborn.
The rest of the class is helping company employees learn how to use DataWriter software to develop accounting reports.
"I feel like these people from the college will get us started on EDI and hopefully get us started talking back and forth to at least one company," Sanborn said. "We have no expertise here.''
Valley Rich handles orders and billing with customers and producers through the mail. Once EDI is installed, all orders and billing will be done by computer.
There was some sense of urgency. "We have our customers telling us that if we don't go EDI, they don't do business with us," Sanborn said.
"If I mail you an invoice, maybe in three days you'll get it," said William C. McEachern Sr., the class's EDI team leader. "When you get it, you've got to process it into your system. Then you've already had several chances for error.
"With EDI, you bought it, somebody keyed it and it's there."
The DataWriter program will streamline Valley Rich's internal accounting process by allowing it to crunch numbers, such as sales figures, faster.
"You can take calculated fields and build a report," said George Matthews, the DataWriter team leader.
The project gained impetus last fall when the students were taking the first part of the course, which focused on techniques such as analyzing a system, defining the needs of the user and creating a new system or modifying the existing one to meet those needs, Russell said.
"I sent out feelers looking for projects. The last week of the semester we met at Valley Rich. The students were interviewed by the controller and the data processing manager, then they wrote a proposal letter, which was approved by the dairy."
Both parties said the project, which is expected to be complete in April, has been successful to this point. "This will phase out a lot of the billing that takes place now; it will cut down on a lot of the paperwork," said Patricia East, Valley Rich's data processing manager.
The class is not made up of typical college students, Russell said.
"Only one of them is a full-time student, so they all have professional lives," she said. "Most of them are older than the average college student and have more self-motivation and more maturity in a business sense.''
Russell, who joined the Virginia Western faculty in January 1994, is teaching the Systems Analysis and Design sequence at the school for the first time. And this is the first time at Virginia Western the class has spent a semester outside the classroom, she said.
"Up until now, when they tried it, the instructor gave them an example. This is the first time anyone has gone out into the community to find a real system for the students to work on."
by CNB