Being a problem solver is one of the qualities shown by Steven Susanto of SISTECH (School of Science and Technology); this student succeeded in making a Document Management System (DMS) for Matahari Department Store (MDS), Tbk. The system is now actively in use and has aided the Legal Department a lot in organizing their documents.
“The aim of my research is to use DMS as a system used to manage, store, and search documents, as well as to send automatic reminders to the departments involved. Before the system is put into effect, MDS had to allocate a lot of time to manage each of their abundant documents. MDS currently has 155 stores – for one store to open, the Legal Department has to assign a contractual document. This calls for a lot of effort, time, and communications that are too complicated to monitor. There are too much room for human error,” Steven explained.
To process a contractual document, the CSL (Corporate Secretary of Legal) Division of MDS had to involve the Real Estate agent responsible for the store. Throughout the process, both parties have to ensure that all the documents needed are available, and that in each step, they will be reviewed using hard copies. Not only is this hard to manage, but the process means a significant waste or paper.
“All these problems led me to come up with a system that boosts efficiency and effectivity – converting the process into a fully digitized one. All you need is to upload the documents into the system. This one system can be accessed by everyone involved, which means easier monitoring. I also added an automatic email feature. There is a user guideline, with everything from Technical Descriptions, Functional Descriptions, a User Guide, and a UAT (User Acceptance Test) document,” Steven said, explaining his program.
Many obstacles came his way during his internship, but that does not stop Steven from making the best of it. He attributed his success to his hard work and tenacity. Equally important, he admitted, is the academic and non-academic lessons he learned in UPH SISTECH. The classes he was enriched with – Programming Language, Advanced Web Engineering, Arduino, and more – , are the reason he is able to build the system, using the prototyping method as the method of system development. The system design is done with the Unified Modelling Language (UML), and the programming language used is PHP, with the Codelgniter framework. He used the MariaDB technology as his data basis management system.
“What I feel is more important than the knowledge I got from UPH SISTECH is how the lecturers are so cooperative, so open to discussion, even from the beginning of the course. Their knowledge and experience have helped me a lot when I faced technical problems at the internship. Cases are easier to solve,” Steven admitted.
“This internship certainly honed both my hard and soft skills in the world of technology. My logical thinking abilities have improved, and I can communicate better with clients and work with what they have in mind. I am proud of myself – I never dreamed of making a system like this, especially in less than 4 months, and that it will be used by a real industry, such as the MDS. I am very thankful and I am very proud,” Steven chirped. (mt)