Streamlined
and simplified procurement system developed using
existing RPG code with looksoftware
and ASP.net
Background
Headquartered in Bristol,
England, Alexandra plc provides the UK's premier
range of uniforms and workwear, including medical,
hospitality and catering clothing. As a leading
supplier of work clothing, they are dedicated
to innovative garment design, providing clients
with top quality work clothes at competitive prices
and with the highest levels of service and support.
Alexandra was founded in 1958 as a mail order
workwear business and since those early days,
it has grown into a multi-location manufacturing
and sales organisation. As a publicly listed company,
its latest financial reports for January 2007
indicate sales of £81.5m, with profit from
operations at £8m. These figures indicate
respectively a healthy 6% and 16% increase on
last year’s results, with employee numbers
broaching 1,000 across its international locations.
Manufacturing has been focussed for over ten
years on the Morocco plant and as well as a number
of regional sales & support centres throughout
the UK, Alexandra also has operations in Raamsdonksveer
in Holland, Roissy and Paris in France and in
Dublin, Ireland.
The company sells its clothing under a number
of brands including ‘Alex Corporate Clothing’,
‘Prima Corporate Wear’ and ‘de
Baer’ tailored corporate clothing. In
2002 the company was granted a Royal Warrant
of Appointment
to Her Majesty the Queen and proudly sports the
Royal Warrant on its
corporate id.
Challenge
With buyers accessing their e-Commerce website
from many diverse locations and using different
procurement applications, Alexandra was keen to
develop a solution that delivered a customized,
streamlined procurement process. They wanted their
customers to be able to select and order product
– from within their own particular procurement
application – in one simple, uninterrupted
operation.
Alexandra are a typical System i customer –
satisfied with their customised back-end applications
and the RPG language, but needing to deliver new
web based solutions quickly.
Communications between the buyers’ applications
and the e-Commerce website would need to be maintained
transparently, in the background via Commerce
XML (cXML).
Solution
& Benefits
Working with software solutions company SCL (www.scl-it.com),
Alexandra developed ‘Punchout’, an
enhanced version of existing RPG code which SCL
used as the basis for the Web application. Using
looksoftware’s soarchitect,
the key RPG functions were service-enabled, making
this functionality available to any other application,
development tool or device that supports web services.
SCL had experience using Microsoft’s Visual
Studio and delivered the ASP.net web site in no
time.
"Using looksoftware’s
products we’ve been able to reuse our existing
System i applications to drive the new web front-end
and integrate with our back-end RPG code in real-time,”
said Ken Turner, Systems Manager at Alexandra.
Improvements
As a result of this improved customer interface,
Alexandra’s customers have been provided
with a greatly streamlined and simplified procurement
system. Punchout’s design means all the
necessary transactions like quotations, orders,
purchases etc, can be automatically processed
by the customers’ own procurement applications
and within Alexandra’s fulfillment application,
with little or no human intervention. Indeed that
is only required where there is a need for approvals
or authorisations etc.
The business benefits are enormous to Alexandra
and its customers alike. Procurement and fulfillment
processes are simplified, automated and accelerated
– and of course the opportunity for error
is significantly reduced, thereby improving accuracy
and productivity.
The technical benefits are also significant.
Alexandra can continue to rely on RPG and their
System i as their primary platform. New business
rules written in RPG can be exposed as web services
in minutes, enabling easy integration with other
applications and platforms.
“With the experience gained, we can see
many more areas where looksoftware’s
products will be of great use in reusing our primary
System i applications to drive other new web based
solutions." said Ken.
Without doubt, this has resulted in a ‘win-win’
for all and ‘Punchout’ firmly establishes
Alexandra plc as a premier trading partner for
its existing customers and those new customers
it hopes to win over!
Second project goes live in 2 months!
The success of the ‘Punchout’ project
has led to the continuing partnership between
Alexandra and SCL and they are now developing
an improved ‘Retail’ facility, which
is to include credit card processing, emulating
the significant functionality largely derived
from ‘Punchout’ and due to go live
in 2 months!
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