Writing issue and expiry dates on paper cards solved one problem and created another: someone still had to calculate and prepare every card correctly.
A physical card could carry an allocation date, a valid-from date, and a valid-until date. The employee would then know which entitlement should be used before it expired.
But who would create the cards? Annual paid leave begins after a qualifying period and the number of days changes with service. Someone would have to look up each hire date, determine whether this was the grant month, and calculate the correct quantity.
I had employees of my own, and I certainly did not remember every one of their hire dates. A manual card process would send us straight back to the notebooks we were trying to escape.
The AS/400 was far more than a calculator. The right answer was not to print smarter cards; it was to let the system create and manage the cards correctly by itself.
CHAPTER 03 · PART 02 · EPISODE 4 / 9 STORIES · 35 STORIES TOTAL