Here are some sobering statistics: On any given day, nearly one in 10 employees is unexpectedly absent from work, and over a year, this lost productivity costs employers $3,600 per hourly employee. Getting a better handle on the affects of unscheduled absenteeism was one of the hot topics at this year’s KronosWorks, the annual user conference that OS/400 labor management software developer Kronos held last month in Las Vegas, a town that’s no stranger to lost wages or unscheduled absenteeism.

It should come as no surprise that people continue to make up the bulk of organizations’ operating costs. This is

There has been a lot of talk lately about virtualizing hardware and running multiple operating system images on the same machine to make it easier to manage applications. Informatica is now applying that general idea to data transformations with a new version of its flagship PowerCenter product unveiled this week. With PowerCenter 8, the company is looking to break down the barriers to building pipelines that connect physical repositories of data and applications accessing the data.

Informatica’s PowerCenter product began life as an extract, transformation, and load (ETL) tool for building data warehouses from data stored in the transactional systems

There are a plethora of options available to OS/400 shops looking to modernize or migrate their monolithic RPG applications using a service oriented architecture. One of the quickest and easiest ways is to implement a screen scraper that outputs the 5250 datastream as a Web service. ASNA says it has a better way with its ASNA Visual RPG (AVR) for .NET offering. Last week the company unveiled AVR for .NET version 7.2, which adds support for more RPG functions, as well as expanded printing capabilities.

In a new white paper titled, “Screen Scraping: A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing” posted on

OS/400 shops looking for an alternative to Query/400 and other third-party reporting tools may want to take a look at Enterprise Cyberquery (eCQ) from Cyberscience. Last week Cyberscience announced that eCQ now provides out-of-the-box support for a range of OS/400-based ERP applications from SSA Global, including BPCS and PRMS, and the company is looking to further its reach into the operating system and the community.

When you think of ad hoc query and reporting tools, chances are Cyberscience isn’t one of the first software vendors to pop into your mind. While the 28-year-old software company has sold eCQ