Vernon Activities
- Featuring some of our clients and few of the artifacts from their collections
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Client
Rogers Historical Museum
Rogers, Arkansas, USA
Description
Death mask of William Coin Harvey (1851-1936), lawyer, author, proponent of the free silver movement, founder of the Monte Ne (Arkansas, USA) resort, and Liberty Party candidate for U.S. President in 1932.
Neg. #N004962
Procedural Control
A major challenge in designing an activities management package is accommodating
the variety of procedures used. It is not acceptable to
impose 'standard and universal' procedural controls. The
system must be capable of being loaded with your own rules.
Vernon achieves this with its unique Procedural Control tool which provides a harness or framework through which users define their own procedures and rules by specifying parameters.
Procedural control is implemented on all Activities as well as directly on each object for both Object Status (normally used for accessioning procedures) and on Deaccession Status for deaccessioning procedures.
Each implementation is independent of the others. The procedures do not have to be linear and can be sensitive to conditional variations e.g. objects under $100 bypass the Acquisitions Committee approval step, whereas those over $100 do require approval.
Separate procedures can be imposed within the same function
for different circumstances. For example loans procedures
for natural history specimens can be quite distinct from
the loans procedures for fine art objects.
Complex Boolean rules can be defined to identify prerequisite steps and other conditions which include or remove steps according to the nature of the item or any related data (such as the status of a borrower or the value of an object). Adding new steps, re-sequencing, deleting redundant steps or amending rules is a simple process of specifying parameters in a window.
Procedural Control checks that all the rules which apply have been complied with. These can be simple field checking rules such as the date signed must be entered, or can be complex Boolean rules which may use data from related files such as checking that there is a valuation for the object by an authorized Valuer, equal to or greater than the cost. Error messages to the user are defined on the rule table.
If the rules have been transgressed then the user is advised of the error. This can be either a warning or - if sufficiently severe - require rectification before you can progress.
If data checking is passed the system automatically performs any defined actions such as printing reports (e.g. a loan agreement) or automatically generating a Bulk Movement for the items when the loan reaches the status of 'Dispatched'.
An important benefit of Procedural Control is that it provides a detailed and comprehensive documentation of your procedures, specifying the steps, rules, reports, actions and any detailed documentation such as explanatory notes about each step, allowing auditors and management to review procedures at any time.
Steps which are purely manual and do not require any checking or actions by the system can be included for completeness. Creating and maintaining documentation of operational procedures is an important, arduous and often neglected internal control. Vernon's procedural control can ensure your procedural documentation is always current.