adidas
– a name synonymous with style and agility
– applies the same principles to its 5250
System i legacy applications using looksoftware
Background
The adidas Group was started in 1920 by Adi
Dassler, a German entrepreneur. Adi was a real
visionary and wanted to make the best sports shoes
money could buy. Having set up his small business
and naming it ‘adidas’, no guessing
where the name came from - he set about the manufacture
of his perfect sports footwear. By 1928, sports
people were wearing his shoes at the Olympic Games
of that year, held in Amsterdam.
The rest, as they say, is history. Today, with
world Headquarters in Herzogenaurach, Germany
(known to insiders as Herzo-base), Adidas has
become a name that is synonymous with quality,
style and agility, associated with every conceivable
sport and leisure activity, and involved in one
way or another with every major sporting event
in the global calendar today.
From those humble origins in 1920, it is now a
corporation with revenues around €10 billion
and representation in every major market in the
world.
Today, the company is the world’s largest
manufacturer of sports footwear, clothing and
accessories and in 2006 acquired one of its major
competitors, Reebok.
adidas Korea is just one of the many successful
national subsidiaries of the group, now with 500
stores around the country. Being a long-established
user of IBM System i hardware, it had developed
its own legacy ERP application which has successfully
coped with the company’s requirements for
some years.
Challenge
The problem was – and it’s a problem
shared by many 5250 based applications around
the world – the acceptance of the customized
RPG back-end was hampered by its green-screen
front-end. There was also no chance of successfully
and easily achieving the integration requirements
being consistently identified by users for the
desktop functions of Microsoft Office front-end.
“Our system needed agile responses and data
integrity throughout all the processes relating
to new product announcements, promotions and the
processing of orders and sales. To achieve these
requirements, we investigated a number of options,
and newlook gave the best results.
It made it possible for us to develop a graphical,
web-enabled user interface in no time at all from
our text-based legacy system”, said B.H.
Lee, Team Leader of adidas Korea’s IT team.
Solution
“Our end users are very happy with the
convenience and added functions that we have provided
them with. They love the seemless integration
with Microsoft Office and now think the System
i is wonderful!”, said Mr. Lee.
Now they have an integrated, web-enabled system
capable of graphical information work and easy,
rapid integration with other applications - and
with no changes required to the legacy system!
newlook integrates seamlessly
with Excel, Word and other desktop applications.
“The more we use it to enhance, modernize
and integrate our applications, the more we appreciate
the power of the looksoftware
suite of programs”, said Mr. Lee. Our users
are now actively suggesting other ways in which
the applications can benefit from newlook’s
capabilities – it seems to them that there
is very little you can’t do with it!
The old sayings, “Seeing is believing”
and “A picture speaks a thousand words”
are what come to mind when Mr. Lee considers the
outcomes of his recent modernization project.
Indeed, he reckons that the real worth of a good
application is when it outperforms user expectations,
and that is what he and his team have achieved
for adidas Korea’s users - not at all dissimilar
to the aspirations of his founder, Adi Dassler,
all those years ago.
“adidas is leading an important new trend
started by Microsoft and SAP with their Duet product
when they connected SAP back-end functionality
to the Office front-end”, said Marcus Dee,
Managing Director, of looksoftware.
“The analysts including Gartner and Forrester
agree that it makes sense to connect existing
back-end applications to the front-ends that most
users already use and prefer, like Microsoft’s
Outlook and IBM’s Notes. IBM back-end applications
can be accessed from Outlook, Notes, even Google,
relatively easily, using SOA, without changing
a line of code.” Dee continued.
As the corporate slogan says, “Impossible
is Nothing”!
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