Rapid
UI rejuvenation
on existing
applications
Background
The De Beers Group is the
largest diamond mining and marketing company in
the world. They produce over 40 per cent of the
world's annual diamond output by value from their
own mines in South Africa and in partnership with
the governments of Botswana, Namibia and Tanzania.
De Beers' mining operations span every category
of diamond mining - open pit, underground, alluvial,
coastal and sea, while its exploration programme
extends across six continents.
Challenge
De Beers converted from mainframe to AS400, using
CA’s Advantage 2/E in the early nineties.
Their integrated set of applications span Financials,
Engineering and Materials Management, and totals
more than 10 million lines of RPG, servicing 5000
users and replacing the previous mainframe systems.
A review of these applications in mid 2000 found
that while they were functionally strong, new
modern User Interfaces (UIs) could improve productivity
and improve application integration. De Beers’
IT department, Divisional Information Systems
(DIS), undertook the task of evaluating the application
modernization alternatives.
Carina van Niekerk, led the DIS evaluation team.
“newlook and another market
leading modernization solution were closely evaluated.
We had a small window of opportunity to quickly
‘GUIfy’ our green screen applications.
We chose newlook due to its rapid
development features and ease of use. We could
not afford to use a tool that would take months
to modernize our applications, the cost would
have been astronomical.”
Solution
DIS worked with looksoftware
and South African partner InfoLogic to deliver
a pilot to confirm that newlook
could deliver what it promised during the initial
evaluation. There was strong business-user support
for the modernized UI, however for some data entry
tasks, the traditional 5250 interface was preferred
by a few.
Gary Hagemann, InfoLogic Director, commented
"Business-user acceptance is vital to
the success of projects like this. Supporting
multiple UI styles, including traditional emulation
is a common and reasonable user requirement that
newlook handles elegantly. After
2 weeks of initial training and consulting support,
the DIS team completed the rest of the implementation
totalling over 4000 screens in about 2 months.
We were ready to provide more consulting support,
but De Beers just didn’t need it. newlook
astounded us with its ease-of-use, the development
team had no trouble using it.”
Benefits
& Improvements
looksoftware’s ‘on
the fly’ architecture doesn’t require
the existing applications to be changed, converted
or translated, so installing and getting started
is simple. The dynamic environment makes each
field and screen from the existing application
instantly available as objects with supporting
events and properties. Customizations and extensions
may be defined for changing workflow, interface
appearance and behaviour. Where desired, the generated
graphical interfaces may be overridden, redesigned,
split or merged.
While business-users were satisfied with ease
of use consistency and simpler navigation, the
new graphical UI design reflected the De Beers
vision, a modern graphical UI across all its applications.
UI modernization also provides the platform for
delivering more tangible business benefits through
improved application integration.
De Beers has built some applications with CA’s
Plex client server development toolset. Using
looksoftware’s integration
support, these applications were seamlessly integrated
with the refaced applications.
Carina van Niekerk said, "newlook
has provided the rapid UI rejuvenation our existing
applications needed. Users have been impressed
with the refaced applications and many consider
them to be 'new'." Proof indeed that
newlook delivers what it promises.
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