For nearly a century, East Carolina University has served the people of North Carolina and the nation. From modest beginnings as a teacher training school, ECU has grown to become an emerging, national research university with an enrollment of nearly 23,000. With a mission of teaching, research and service, East Carolina University is a dynamic institution connecting people and ideas, finding solutions to problems and seeking the challenges of the future.

We recently spoke to Roma Turner who works closely with EnterpriseSCHEDULE at East Carolina University’s Brody School of Medicine. Utilizing GE Healthcare®’s Flowcast© software for their medical record reporting, East Carolina needed a way to automate their laborious report processing. When it came to end of month billing reports, they were resorting to manual submissions that were costly and time consuming. With the acquisition of EnterpriseSCHEDULE from ISE, they are now able to automate the submission of reports including the user input that they require.

Creating streams of jobs in the layout window that are triggered by a job that uses automatic rescheduling, they are able to submit their jobs sequentially, reducing overall system resource demands. The jobs are connected using interdependencies known as initiates which automatically submit a job when its predecessor finishes.

“The product is fantastic, I’m crazy about it”.

Roma Turner
East Carolina University

Roma utilizes EnterpriseSCHEDULE’s unique client/server architecture from home where he controls and administers job streams running on his in-house Alpha Server using the Windows client on his home PC. In this age of telecommuting and all hours processing, the need for a remote client that can be used to control, administer and monitor job activity is more a necessity than a convenience.

East Carolina utilizes two methods to automate their Flowcast© jobs that allow hands off processing of scheduled jobs:

Using the VMS keystroke capture utility that is part of EnterpriseSCHEDULE, a user can create an interactive input sequence in the form of a text file. Flowcast or any other interactive command line application uses the input sequence text to read in the data required for a job at runtime.

Using preprocessor directives, data may be input into a job’s commands section at runtime using the job’s built in parameters. This means the user only needs to change the parameters in a job’s property page to update the input. Custom property pages may be created to make the input fields simple for an operator or user to fill in.

Together these tools facilitate total automation of East Carolina’s Flowcast© job processing tasks.

Roma expressed his enthusiasm for ISE support of EnterpriseSCHEDULE, commenting “we get a lot of support when we need it”. He also feels the product more than meets the School of Medicine’s needs, saying “the product is fantastic, I’m crazy about it”.