Audience: This bulletin will be of special interest to system administrators and managers who will oversee the setup and management of the Skills Manager application.  It will also be of interest to individuals who are responsible for archiving and un-archiving employee records.

The Employee Archive feature can reduce the time required to produce employee reports from 20% to 60%. A very dramatic improvement indeed! The purpose of the archive is to permit users to move inactive employees from the employee table to an employee archive table, thereby lightening the load on Skills Manager when it is called upon to produce employee reports.

We have observed that many of our customers have large numbers of inactive employees in their databases and therefore stand to benefit from the archive feature. In fact, after analyzing several customer databases, we realized that 20%-55% of the employees in the average database are inactive. When a report is launched the Employee table is processed from start to end as the report filters determine who qualifies for the report. This means that all active and inactive employees (potentially thousands of records) are processed whether they are included in the report, or not. Moving inactive employees to the archive significantly reduces the number of records that the computer must process to compile the report thus resulting in lighter loads on the server, reduced network traffic, and shorter reporting times.

The archive feature permits inactive employees to be moved quickly and easily to a special employee archive table. A "Move Employee to Archive" button on the Browse Employees form moves employees to the archive one at a time. A utility is also provided to assist you with moving large groups of inactive employees to the archive all at once. This utility, named "Archive Employees", runs from the reporter so users can define various filters to control which employees are moved. All inactive employees can be archived in just a few minutes with this utility.

Browse Employee Archive and Update Employee Archive forms provide access to employee records after they are archived. An Employee Archive Profile Report produces a complete printout of an archived employee and their related data.

Customers will want to develop a policy regarding the movement of employees to the archive. It is common place for many employees to be unemployed for short periods while they transfer between agencies or look for new employment. Some organizations do not immediately terminate certification when an officer becomes unemployed but grant a grace period of several weeks to several months before certification is terminated. There is little benefit to moving employees in and out of the archive repeatedly. In fact, it would create a fair amount of work. We recommend developing criteria that will be used to determine when employees can be safely moved to the archive with a very small chance that they will need to be restored. For example, after their certification expires or even several months after it expires.

We know that few things are permanent. That is why we have also provided the means to restore employees from the archive to the active employee table. Archived employees can be reactivated individually using the "Restore Archived Employee" button located on the new Browse Archived Employees form. A utility has also been provided so entire groups of archived employees can be restored to the active employee table automatically. This utility, named "Restore Archived Employees", runs from the reporter so users can define filters that control which the employees are restored.

When new employees are added via the Employee Entry form, Skills Manager checks  the employee archive to see if the new employee might already exist in the database. If a match is found, the user is notified immediately so they do not proceed to add the employee a second time.

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