Chapter 8. Commission Calculations Abstract and Design

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In this, the second of the book s Real World Implementation examples, the application relates to a much larger corporation. In this case, the client is an international corporation with salespeople scattered all over the world. Their Financial Analysis department is made up of a mix of Europeans and Americans, and most of the Europeans have come into the department as a result of the acquisition of a European competitor. Each department has its own Information Systems (IS) division whose sole purpose is to support the computing needs of the parent department. As far as American companies go, the Financial Analysis department is quite diverse technology-wise: In addition to a mix of servers (NT Server, Sun Solaris, Linux, and AS400), it also has a mix of Linux and Windows workstations including Windows95, Windows98, Red Hat, and SuSE Linux.

This weird mix of systems has led to no small number of integration problems, but it has also allowed them to choose the best tool for any given application. It has also meant that things tend to be brought down to the lowest common denominator : text-based files, comma- or tab-delimited files, chaining of applications, heavy use of FTP and other cross-platform applications, and so on.

One of the Financial Analysts (FAs) has the monthly duty of computing and reporting to Accounts Payable the commissions for more than 100 salespeople, as well as producing reports for each of the managers for individual countries (such as the United States and France) in the Marketing Department. The FA with these duties is currently using a spreadsheet to perform this function, and it takes approximately two weeks out of each month to produce the required information. The desire is to reduce the process to one or two days.

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