EBME Forums Forums Maintenance Biomed Databases Data transfers from HECS

Has anyone recently acquired the E-MAT asset management system & had their data transferred from HECS? We are interested in this product and would welcome any advice or things to be aware of before embarking on an exercise of this magnitude.

Am I right in saying (remembering) that HECS datafiles are in .dbf format? If so, transfer to, from and between the various file formats should not present too much of a problem, I would have thought.

And, in any case, as long as the original data is preserved, any "experimentation" shouldn't cause damage anyway. It's really just a matter of proceeding in a careful, thoughtful, manner!

Meanwhile, I can't help but wonder why "North Devon" isn't talking to "South Devon" about their much lauded system!

Its probably something to do with the great North-South Divide,
We had no problems transferring all the data from our old HECS to F2.

At the end of the day (there's a lovely BS phrase for you), data is only a collection of ASCII characters in a file on a disc.

If you say so Geoff, I have no clue on that, all I know its worth 14 years or so of hard inputing, to achive what we have.

All of it quality, error free, data too (no doubt)!

Yep!! you've guessed it,100% correct, as it should be

Like many of the over-used sayings, "Garbage In ... Garage Out" definitely has the ring of truth about it.

I probably see more (of other people's) equipment maintenance data than most, and you can be assured that a lot of it is utter [censored]! Stuff that was obviously, shall we say, entered in a hurry perhaps ten years before is still sitting there ... misspelt (of course), incorrectly classified or coded, or simply wrong ... for some reason it just stays there, staring people in the face. I always wonder why bad data doesn't just get, er, corrected!

One of the nice things about data held on computer is that it's not cast in stone. But (from what I see of many people's data-sets), it might as well be.

Has anyone gotten an idea of continuing with HECS and yet not be affected by the license key thingy.

Doesn't HECS use straight forward .dbf datafiles? So, if you're not happy with the annual (or whatever) gouge why not just go ahead and "reverse engineer" the thing, and be done with it?

Who knows, you might even improve it (or at least get it to do what you actually want) along the way!