Just because you are changing your point-of-sale application and platform does not mean that you have to give up your electronic journal search tool, ESCAPE™. EDJ Enterprises, Inc. (EDJ) has experience interfacing other electronic journals to ESCAPE. EDJ can build you an indexer to allow your new electronic journals to work and co-exist with your old electronic journals. This is the best of both worlds.
As an example, the IBM ACE application creates individual electronic journal files for each point of sale register for each day. Throughout the day, the journal files grow as new transactions are performed at the register. The ACE-Indexer application uses a timer task that to check for changes in the length of any of the electronic journal files. The ACE-Indexer inspects the individual journal transactions (pattern recognition) to create an index record for each transaction and the transaction security code. The index
record is written to the associated index file. At the completion of this process, ESCAPE has the index files and the journal files that it needs to be able to function.
If your new system creates a single journal file for all registers, this is no problem. The indexer application can be configured to scan the single file and to create the individual journal files needed for ESCAPE. Having individual journal files makes the search process go faster and brings results to the user in mere seconds.
ESCAPE is a text based search tool. This means that you can have both old system and new system electronic journals in the same file structure. Your users will not have to keep track of the conversion date for a store. They will just use the tool like normal. EDJ can provide the indexer to you for a one-time charge. Support and maintenance are offered as an annual contract in case you need to make changes or improvements caused by the underlying point-of-sale application.