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 product suite."

Solution

The dynamic architecture and generic rules capability of looksoftware's product suite 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.

looksoftware's product suite 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 product suite 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 looksoftware's 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 looksoftware's product suite. Datastream information is the result of applying the business rules, unlike ‘raw’ database information. Where direct database access is required, looksoftware's product suite provides read/write access to popular database platforms including DB2, Oracle, SQL Server and Access. Extending and integrating existing applications using looksoftware’s datastream and database access options are non-invasive, requiring no changes to the original host application.

looksoftware's product suite also supports two methods of directly accessing server-based programs and commands. RPC support allows a looksoftware 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 product suite has 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."