Electronic Data Processing - Office Management

ELECTRONIC DATA PROCESSING

Introduction:

Electronic data processing (EDP) enables the firms to quickly process large volume of data accurately through application of computer. It applies variety of logical and mathematical decision making techniques to carry out the functions of data processing with predetermined priorities of the data. EDP increased the output of the work and efficiency by adopting proper mechanisms of storing, maintaining and retrieval of data when needed, based on the purpose which is meant for.

Meaning:

The word ‘data’ is the plural of ‘datum’ though data is commonly used as both in the singular and plural forms. Data refers to any fact, observation, assumption or occurrence. Data are facts which form the basic material to be processed to produce information. Data are compiled to form reports, figures or documents etc. Data can be a form of numerical or alphabetical characters or special symbols (viz=,+,% etc) . Some important data definitions are given below.

Digit: A simple numeric character 0, 1, 2 ...9.

Character: A simple alphabetic, numeric or special character that is used to represent data. For example,0,1,2 ...9, A, B, C......Z, +,-,%, etc.

Data item (field): A set of characters which are used together to represent a specific data element, e.g., a name items contains the alphabetic characters in a name, and an amount of items that contains the numeric in an amount.

Record: It consists of a group of data items related to an object of data processing e.g., a payroll, record of an employee which contains data fields as name, age, qualification, sex, wage rate etc.

Data file is a compilation of related data records maintained in some pre-arranged order. Files are usually created function-wise e.g., a payroll file might consist of 1,000 individual employees data records and the records might be arranged in file by employee number.

The relationship of a character, data item, record and the file is shown in figure 1 below