Mid-Penn

DBQ in Finance

Mid-Penn uses DBQ queries to track lost account payments Mid-Penn is a Pennsylvania banking firm with receivables in excess of $18,000,000.00. Fred Robinson, Vice-President, administers 40 employees responsible for over 6,000 small loan accounts. Mr. Robinson uses VOS files for all his accounts. A typical account record contains about 3,000 bytes. The following interview between Application Resources and Mr. Robinson took place at the main office of Mid-Penn located in downtown Philadelphia.

Why did you need an ad-hoc query system?

Robinson: "Basically, every time a new requirement came up to do something, we had to write a new program. It was always something like 'can you find something in the database,'or'can you look for something?' And although I can write one or two little programs to do that, it became very time consuming in the long run."

How did you solve the problem?

Robinson: "I saw DBQ at one of the conferences, liked the approach of it, had them demonstrate it here for us, and we started using it."

Can you give a specific example of how you use the product?

Robinson: "One of my basic problems happened when I needed to find a lost payment- We have about 6,000 accounts, for which we get 6,000 payments a month, half of them come in the mail and half of them come in over the counter. "Sometimes a customer says, 'I mailed you my money order last week,' and we don't have it. Occasionally, since everything is posted by hand, and anyone can make a mistake, someone puts down the wrong account number, or the wrong name and address. It turns out that we do have the payment but it has been misapplied.

"DBQ is written to look for those specific cases. It was very easy to build a query and it allowed me to make it essentially safe for my on-line users to execute a query which looks or a payment of an actual dollar amount along with a check number.

"It doesn't matter to DBQ what account the payment is in. It finds the payment regardless of its location. It then displays the payments as a report.

"At that point our employees can actually go back and retrieve the accounts and look at them one by one to see if the payment makes sense as to the account it was supposed to apply to. So that's one of the problems we solved."

In what ways do you save money by using DBQ?

Robinson: "The biggest savings have been in my resource. Basically I am the DP staff here. We have a small firm, so every time that I can save myself fifteen minutes to an hour not coding something is time well spent on something else.

"This product has given me the chance to say to my employees, 'here's something, run with it, and use it.' There's never been a time when I had to go in and debug it, or find out, 'did it do it, did it do it right?'

How was installation of the product?

Robinson: "Seamless. When it first came out of the box, it was simply one-two-three, and it was up. We just plugged it in, took it off the tape, and we were up and running."

Did you find DBQ easy to use?

Robinson: "In terms of ease-of-use, it was very easy for me to learn how to use it.

Is it quicker than using a programming language?

Robinson: "Absolutely. No exceptions."

How do you feel about the technical support you have received?

Robinson: "Technical support from Application Resources has been excellent. When I have called in I've always been able to talk to a technician. They always get back to me promptly."

Have you tried any other solution besides DBQ?

Robinson: "We originally bought a competitor product to DBQ. It worked, but it was very difficult to use and when we upgraded from our old processors to the new RISC environment it stopped working altogether.

"Their technical support department never got back to us when we called them about it. Actually, I think they did get back to us some time after we bought DBQ, but it was a little late by then. "

Any closing comments?

Robinson: "Since the early days of DBQ I've had no problems at all with it. I put a minimal amount of time into it, and got the maximum return. I guess that's the best way to put it."