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NDS Design
Review
UNDCP reviews the design of NDS 4.0 at Datamatics Mumbai. The review
resulted in many changes (568 changes) to be implemented that aims at:
- Enhancing the usability of the system
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The usability and user-friendliness of the system have
been one of the main concerns during the upgrade process from NDS3.3e to NDS4.0.
Therefore, special care was made during the review process to make the system as
user-friendly as possible. The design review team placed themselves as the day to
day users of the system and paid special attention to the fine details of processing
entering and processing the data. The following are some of the major enhancements:
- All the header information for any transaction (like country code, competent authority
code) can be prefixed using the user-preferences menu.
- The user can choose to disable warning messages during massive data-entry jobs which
would speed up the data entry process.
- Once the user enters a transaction in the system, the same transaction specific
information is carried forward to the next inserted record. For example, while
issuing an import authorization, the system would carry the establishment code, and
substance code to the next entry record which would make the user have to enter only the
requested quantity.
- All the similar screens have been grouped into modules. Thus, the number of
screens that the user have to log into has been reduced to 6 modules. If the user
has logged into one of the modules, then he is not required to log into any other module.
-Batch printing directly from the open application is now possible. The user can
issue all the documents that he needs during the day. At the end of the day, the
user can query all the documents that he has issued and with one button click, all these
documents would be printed. A batch print print report would be generated for future
reference.
- The system keeps record of all the requests that have been submitted but not authorized.
Once the user goes to the open requests screen, he can open any of the documents
for authorization with button click. |
- Enhancing the general system performance
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The system performance is also one of the main concerns
that the design review team has paid special attention to. The target performance
for report generation is brought down to 5 seconds per document. This means that the
system user can issue 100 import/export authorizations in 8 minutes. The system also
performs auto-save for newly inserted records and modified records which enhances the
total data-entry time significantly. |
- Fixing bugs that were discovered in the Beta release
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Some bugs were discovered in the beta release. The development team
is working on fixing these problems before passing the system for the user-acceptance
testing. |
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