Electronic SANDI System

The Electronic Sandi (ESandi) system provides user friendly access to staff appointment, payment, and distribution data on the MITVMA and MITVMC mainframes. The purpose of ESandi is the same as the paper SANDI.

Some advantages of using ESandi, rather than paper SANDI forms, are that you can:

• list appointments by account, object code, and modified or approval status (see ESandi main menu above),
• make real time changes to SANDI distributions that show up immediately on your screen and those of MIT Payroll,
• enter memos of justification online, when distribution changes require CAO approval, and receive information about CAO's approval or disapproval electronically,
• review the distribution audit trail for an appointment, including memos of justification,
• enter and review appointment notes,
• play "what if" with distributions for an appointment (that is, calculate percent distribution for the appointment without saving the results),
• check your calculations of percent distribution electronically before saving them,
• look up department numbers, departmental accounts, and appointment object codes online.

ESandi development began as a joint project for CAO and IS and took two years to complete. The problem was to use client/server technology to communicate via the network with an ADABAS database (the MIT payroll database on MITVMC), using Kerberos for user authentication and the DES data encryption standard for encryption.