Subnovice question

Calling myself a novice would be inflating my skills/knowledge.

My situation and following question:

I have a customer (a Human Resources Department) that requires a
web-based system for the purposes of allowing employees to self-enroll
in their employee benefits of choice. This will not be a problem for
us. Where we will soon be stumped are the following additional
requirements:

#1 That after completion of the web-based enrollment, we provide the
customer's IT department with an EBCIDC file (mixed data types) that
must be packed/zoned for certain of the data fields, according to their
specs. An example would be EMPLOYEE_NMBR, packed, field length
9....0(precision), buffer length 5, buffer position 19.., etc. After we
deliver, their IT department will do their thing to update their system
(AS400, DB2). As near as I can understand, the customer's IT group is
either too busy or too cranky to set up this "web-data collection" on
their own. Apparently there is a hornets nest of intra-company
politics (HR vs IT). I'd rather not be the one to kick the hive.

#2 That we should expect 0 help from IT when it comes to this
"packing/zoning" stuff.

#3 That we leave JDBC/ODBC out of it. IT has no interest.

There are about 75 fields spread across 5 files, a few of which are CHAR
and are not packed/zoned.

We have located (but not purchased) commercial, desktop software that
can get the data from ASCII to EBCIDC, but we are clueless on getting it
packed/zoned correctly. I'd rather not use a service if this particular
wheel has already been invented. We do NOT have access to a AS400/DB2
system.

I have a feeling this whole "packing" thing is left over from the old
days and will probably save < 1 meg of space, but we do not have a
choice.

Any help..... clues.... suggestions? Please use small words. I'm the
salesguy :•)

Thanks!

Mike