Integration
the key to
Siebensoft's
future
Based in Buenos
Aires, Argentina, aRED
P.I. specializes in software solutions for
Human Resources and personnel development. They
offer a suite of seven products and services and
have been providing solutions for over 20 years.
Flexibility is a key reason why companies like
Bayer, Bank of Brazil, Schering Plough and SKF
have selected aRED P.I.’s human resources
application ‘Siebensoft'.
Challenge
The application enables the business user to
design and implement additional database tables
and custom forms. It allows customers the open-ended
flexibility to change the behaviour and screens
of the application without requiring IT expertise.
Siebensoft's architecture is traditional iSeries
RPG but the philosophy of allowing the business
users to control and change the business rules
is consistent with the latest generation of application
solutions.
aRED P.I.’s CEO, Mr Federico Schäfer
said, "We needed to make our application
easy to integrate with and easy to learn and use.
Most of our customers required easy application
integration with desktop applications and wanted
our application to look and behave like a Windows
application. After evaluating market-leading alternatives,
we selected looksoftware’s
centric and newlook."
Solution
newlook’s dynamic architecture
and generic rules capability was the only solution
that worked well with Siebensoft. Because Siebensoft
customers can define their own screen interfaces,
every customer’s application is different,
so a dynamic solution was required.
newlook interacts with the application
in real-time and supports generic rules. Because
the user interfaces are generated at execution
time, it handles Siebensoft’s capabilities
easily.
"Within
3 months
we
were trained,
the project
was completed
and we began
working with
customers.
We found
looksoftware’s
products
to be very
intuitive,
and sophisticated
features
could be
implemented
without having
to learn
new programming
languages."
Federico said, “Our customer, Aventis,
was planning to install SAP, but decided to keep
using ‘Siebensoft’ after centric
desktop integration capabilities were utilized
to provide contract and certificate printing from
Siebensoft.”
Another
large customer,
Bayer, has
improved
productivity
significantly
by automating
integration
of Siebensoft
information
with 20 Word
documents
and 10 Excel
spreadsheets.
Previously
the business
user navigated
multiple
Siebensoft
screens copying
and pasting
data into
the Word
documents
and Excel
spreadsheets.
A new form
now prompts
the user
to select
which documents
and spreadsheets
are required
and a centric
macro automates
the integration
task, reducing
the time
required
by 4 hours.
Benefits
Easily integrating information from the 5250
datastream with other applications is an important
feature of centric. Datastream
information is the result of applying the business
rules, unlike ‘raw’ database information.
Where direct database access is required, centric
provides read/write access to popular database
platforms including DB2, Oracle, SQL Server and
Access. Extending and integrating existing applications
using centric’s datastream
and database access options are non-invasive,
requiring no changes to the original host application.
centric
also supports
two methods
of directly
accessing
server-based
programs
and commands.
RPC support
allows a
newlook
UI to integrate
tightly with
new or existing
server-based
programs
such as RPG,
COBOL or
Java. Web
Services
consumption
is another
extension
option supported.
Federico concludes, "In addition to
having a strong integration capability and happier
customers, looksoftware solutions
have made us much more competitive and our product
demonstrations are more effective. looksoftware’s
centric and newlook
have allowed aRED P.I. and our customers to remain
satisfied iSeries users."
"We can continue to benefit from eServer
security and scalability, whilst providing rapid
integration with other platforms and applications."
aRED P.I. has a strong set of iSeries skills
and experience, which looksoftware
protects – "We’ve been able
to reuse our existing traditional applications,
provide modern flexible UI support and multi-platform
integration support without the complexity of
the other alternatives."
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