Registrar (software)
Registrar was software used in the personnel or human resources (HR) area of businesses from 1984–2000.
It was the first piece of software developed[citation needed] to provide HR with the ability to manage training administration, booking people on courses, sending call-up letters, and recording their attendance.
Phil Bookman and Richard Silton formed the company of SBS based in Cupertino in California in 1983.
He mentioned this to his friend Phil Bookman, who told him that he could write the software to do this, so they started the company.
SBS started off by producing demonstration disks which clients could have without charge, and then if they liked the product, they could order a working version.
The demonstration came preloaded with data, and allowed a small number records to be added which was reset each time the demo was loaded.
The first company to buy the product was IBM Canada, closely followed by McDonald-Douglas Automation and Buick.
The fact, that Registrar had both export and import facilities in various formats made this very easy.
Matchetts were very successful, and had over 500 clients using the Registrar software, not only in Europe but also in the Middle East.
If the training had not taken place within one year of the due date, it would be removed from the person plan but a warning would be generated.
Registrar had the ability to Group people either manually or automatically the later being decided upon the values of a field.
Reports could be run against these registration e.g., if the manager wanted to know the names of people who No Showed twice during the last six months this could easily be produced.
i.e., a call up letter could be trigger to send a latter to all the Enrolled people two weeks before the Class was due to run.
It allowed close control of budgets for training, for example the break even point for the numbers of enrollments to make the Class profitable would be calculated automatically.
Registrar could generate a report giving a list of tasks that needed to be done by the administration staff.
Some clients did this once whilst others did it on a regular basis, relying on the HR system to create people's records, instead of manually doing this in Registrar.
SBS introduced the facility for users to actually look at their own individual training record and also make and change registrations for themselves, if allowed to do so.
This product was initially called Personal Registrar but was changed to Student Center.
John Matchetts, the European distributor, also started running user conferences in the early 1990s.
SBS started to run training courses on Registrar about a year after the product was launched.
Here are just a few of the European clients 3M, British Airways, Alcatel, Arcadia, Astra Zeneca, AT&T, Barclays, BBC, Black & Decker, BMW, British Aerospace, BT, CAA, Carillion, Coca-Cola, DCUK, Deloitte & Touche, DHL, Dow Jones, DTI, Eurostar, Ford, Glaxo, J P Morgan, Jaguar Cars, JCB, Land Rover, Magnox, Merrill Lynch, National Grid, Nissan, Nokia, Norwich Union, Open University, RAF, Rank Xerox, Rover Cars, Royal Navy, Sheppard Moscow, Siemens, TNT, UN, US Army, VAG, Vodafone, and many others.
