SA Police Super works with MBS to update their System

SA Police Super have been using PICK in one form or another since 1992 to help administer our Superannuation Scheme. The original legacy software was developed by a Melbourne company and has since undergone monumental changes to bring it in line with the boundless legislative and taxation changes which relentlessly rain upon us every year. Not to mention all the user changes to make the system more effective and user friendly. As such, we have spent a lot of time and effort (not to mention money) to have what I would call a mature system. It does what it does and it does it fairly well given its legacy constraints.

We're now in the 21st century and it's time to upgrade the look and feel of the application, incorporating some of the latest technologies and industry standards, to ensure it is up-to-date and cutting edge. We have so much invested in our system; it's tailored to our needs and fits our business perfectly in terms of functionality, it just requires a more modern interface. There's only one of me however, and I'm spread pretty thinly, so what to do?

With the above in mind I turned to our good friends at MBS to talk about moving into the 21st century using our existing D3 database. We needed something that would allow us to use existing business rules built into our system and provide a modern look and feel GUI interface to provide more meaningful displays than the old legacy 80x25 green screens.

MVS Toolkit to the rescue!

The good folks at MBS showed us the MVS Toolkit which allows us to communicate with our D3 database via web services thus opening the door to a browser-based system using the existing business rules subroutines) and of course the ability to provide more meaningful "screens", i.e. web pages with way more detail than ever possible on an 80x25 green screen display.

There are a whole bunch of new technologies involved which need to be learned: HTML, CSS, jQuery, Ajax, MVSToolkit. Best practises need to be researched, developed and implemented. It's not an "easy" road to travel, but it's sure interesting and exciting melding these modern technologies together with D3.

I'm by no stretch of the imagination an expert in any of these technologies, but I have programmed in FlashBASIC for decades and dabbled in C#, VB and HTML for a few years thus enabling me to understand and pick up these new technologies.

With the eager help of the skilled MBS Team I've been able to start putting together the beginnings of a new intranet web-based system which will take us into the 21st century and beyond. Yes, it's only 1 page, but it's the foundation upon which the new system will be built.