Theoa|Total Office System of RTRI
Takashi WATANABE
Manager, OA Promotion Division
Technological Development Dept.
We developed and are operating an information system called Theoa. Theo means God in Greek and we aim at "the OA". Theoa enables us to do activities of our Railway Technical Research Institute using a UNIX workstation and personal computers very efficiently.
We adopted "One Writing" as the concept of system construction. "One Writing" implies that the information must be input only once at the point where it is originated. It should not be re-input but stored into databases and used by retrieving from the databases whenever it is necessary.
The system is composed of a UNIX workstation and about 600 personal computers which are connected by local area networks and by wide area networks using communication lines for exclusive use. We adopted Infomix as DBMS on the server and wrote 500Ksteps client programs by Visual Basic. We developed a middle software called RMTSQL (Remote SQL) which connects server and clients.
In Theoa, Workflow Management plays the most important role. It controls the flow of electronic paper by request. This defines the route of electronic paper and, according to the definition, electronic paper is transmitted. This is composed of several program libraries of the functions of flow control.
The members in our institute input request for holidays and official trips and traffic fees. Theoa transmits the request to his manager according to Workflow Management. Also, the system displays the attendance time and leave time input by non-touched IC cards and accumulates working time by calculating the difference of both times. The traffic fee is paid into his bank account.
The members input electronic requests about what they want to purchase in order to carry out their researches. After his manager's electronic approval through personal computer, the request is transferred to the purchasing division. The division decides the dealing company and price and stored the data about bargain prices.
Researchers input the plan of their research about process, money and manpower. The input planned values are stored into database and compared with actual values retrieved from Work Management and Purchase Management.
Theoa started the operation in April 1991 in a DOS environment and made office work extremely efficient. It changed its platform to Windows 3.1 in November 1995. And at the end of 1996 it is scheduled to change the platform of server from UNIX to WindowsNT.
