mrc case study: Collins & Aikman

Collins & Aikman built this mrc-Productivity Series "Backing Orders Headers" application to provide users with desktop access to live AS/400 customer data.

The benefits of distributed computing are clear. From user-friendly, graphical user interfaces (GUI), to manipulating AS/400 data from the desktop - client/server technology greatly enhances the AS/400's functionality and accessibility for the average user.

But as many companies have discovered, the road to client/server can be fraught with perils and road blocks which can make the journey unnavigable. We saw fat-client architectures soar in popularity only to fall and crash, weighed down by complexity and high costs. GUI screenscrapers seemed a great way to 'doll up' green screen applications. But cost justifying these tools grew difficult - the added cost and complexity contributing little more than making standard RPG applications look pretty.

"Thin-Client" or "Network-Centric" architectures have addressed many of the cost and complexity issues associated with distributed computing. But other factors also delay its widespread adoption. Those include: (1) Lack of in-house expertise in PC and Internet programming languages; (2) Significant investment in legacy code; and (3) IS Problems meeting ongoing responsibilities while also managing massive migration effort. And these factors are magnified for small and midsize IS shops seeking to modernize their AS/400 environments.

While the C/S challenges facing AS/400 shops are well documented, solutions for successful migrations are not. What spurs the need to modernize? How can IS leverage small staffs and in-house talent? What tools ease the shock of transition? Dalton, Georgia-based Collins & Aikman Floorcoverings' provides some guidance to answer these vexing questions.

This thirty-year-old leader in the specialty vinyl-backed floorcoverings industry houses all of its enterprise data on a Model 510 AS/400. The company also utilizes three UNIX servers, three Windows NT servers and four Novell servers on their network.

As IS Director, Randy Waldrop, explains, the company was not looking at client/server as a means to replace their AS/400 legacy systems, but rather to enhance them. "I see the need for client/server, but it's not the answer to everything. We weren't interested in client/server from a full-blown application standpoint. But we felt certain applications would work better in that environment."

For instance, many users would take AS/400 hard-copy report data and re-key it into PC spreadsheets for further analysis. Aside from the obvious inefficiencies, data entry errors often resulted. Waldrop felt a client/server download application that pulls specified data off the AS/400 and loads it directly into MS Excel would be an extraordinary time saver.

Waldrop had many other ideas for C/S implementation, but he says the IS department was unprepared to take advantage of it. "We only have one Visual Basic programmer on staff. Everyone else is RPG."

Leveraging Existing Resources

Waldrop did not have the luxury of hiring a second programming department. He had no intention of rewriting his legacy systems from the ground up just to migrate to client/server. And he could not halt normal IS operations simply to modernize. So he needed a solution that would leverage his current resources and allow the company to migrate to client/server and Java over time, as needs dictated.

Waldrop took stock of his resources. He had 5 highly trained RPG programmers who were accustomed to full-scale AS/400 development. He also employed one Visual Basic programmer, Cindy McRae, who also was fluent in RPG and other programming languages.

McRae's Visual Basic expertise placed her at the center of the company's migration strategy. But employing one multilingual programmer would not be sufficient to carry the company forward in the long run. To reap the greatest productivity from her efforts, and assist the other programmers in learning Visual Basic, Waldrop required some assistance from technology. He chose michaels, ross & cole's (mrc) mrc-Productivity Series 97, a thin-client RPG, Visual Basic and Java rapid application development (RAD) and report writing tool.

"We looked at some Visual RPG products, but none of them really compared to what mrc could do. None of them gave you code. They didn't take you from one place to another like mrc will. This tool was a way to bridge the gap between green screen and client/server."

Collins & Aikman did not make this choice lightly. They explored Visual RPG products as a potential solution. But, as McRae put it, they soon realized that there existed a vast difference between visual programming languages - 3GL's, and 4GL tools like mrc-Productivity Series 97. "We looked at some Visual RPG products, but none of them really compared to what mrc could do. None of them gave you code. They didn't take you from one place to another like mrc will. This tool was a way to bridge the gap between green screen and client/server."

Likewise, screen scrapers were not an option. "They're pretty static devices. They're accurate enough. But as soon as you modify your application, everything changes and your screen scrapers are gone. You have to redo them."

Impressing an Expert

The RAD tool seemed ideal because of three claimed capabilities: (1) It automatically generates high-level RPG, Visual Basic and/or Java applications and reports individually or simultaneously - without manual programming; (2) It generates accessible code that would actually help teach RPG programmers Visual Basic programming; and (3) It eliminates the legacy code problem because any application generated in one language instantly could be regenerated in another automatically. This meant developing in RPG today would not add to the C/S migration burden, tomorrow.

At first, however, McRae was leery of such lofty claims. "I'm used to writing my own code. I was pretty skeptical about how the client/server generator was going to work." But she felt safer knowing that the tool generated high-level RPG & Visual Basic code. "I wanted to stay away from anything proprietary. You get locked into something that way and you just have to scrap everything." McRae had just the project to put mrc-Productivity Series 97 through its paces.

Collins & Aikman was rolling out a brand new carpet backing - ER3. "We're very environment-oriented here. With no compromises to the performance of the product, we redesigned our backing system with one that's made from recycled carpet. Our production people are trying to stay right on top of it as it gets installed into customers' stores and offices. They want to make sure things are going well, and that we've got good quality control."

Good quality control would require, among other things, easy access to live AS/400 order and shipment data. "The quality control people needed to know who was placing orders, the shipment dates, and who was scheduled to do the installations."

Previously, McRae says, keeping track of this information was no easy task. "The quality control person would have to watch production in the plant. If he saw an order come through, he'd have to call Production Planning and find out what the order was and write it down on a piece of paper. Then he'd have to call Customer Service, find out - using the order number - who the customer was, where it was being shipped and the promise date. Then he'd have to call the field client to ensure someone would be at the sight at delivery time."

McRae looked to mrc-Productivity Series 97 to solve this efficiency problem. In just two days she became proficient on the tool. She built an EIS drilldown application in Visual Basic to automate the quality control process. "It shows what's on order for all our backings. Double click on "ER3" and it opens another window that displays orders, customer name, state and order quantity. By double clicking on that, it brings up all the information for that order. So we've drilled down three times. There are no phone calls. They don't have to track anything down because they just double click on it and it's all right there. It has quite impressed the users."

"It's 90% more efficient than before."

Not only does the application make quality control radically easier, McRae adds, but it also facilitates better communication. "It's 90% more efficient than before. Previously, the quality person was typing all this up into a Microsoft Word document, printing it out eight or ten times and sending it out through interoffice mail. Now, they all have the information. I can put it on anybody's desktop."

Indeed, management was so impressed with the online drilldown, they view the technology as an environmental booster. "People are tempted to print reports out when you e-mail them. One report, for instance, was probably four or five pages and being sent out regularly to ten different people. Now, they just double click on an icon and the AS/400 data is right there. It never goes away. So they're not as tempted to print things out, because they know they can get to it. Now upper management makes notations on memos, 'Can we do this automatically and save a tree?'"

Have It Your Way

No development platform is capable of satisfying all users, all the time. And mrc-Productivity Series 97 was no exception. McRae is a skilled programmer, and she didn't always agree with how the tool generated code. As it turns out, what she thought would be a limitation in the tool, turned out to be its most powerful feature.

"Since we are using the TCP-IP version of mrc-Productivity Series, the user must sign-on before the program will function." This usually serves as a security feature in the tool. But because of Collins & Aikman's internal environment, it became an inconvenience.

Because mrc generates code, like many other 4GL tools, she could have just modified the code to suit her needs. But then she would encounter the same dilemma every time she built an application. But McRae was happy to learn that she wouldn't have to live with this mrc default.

mrc-Productivity Series 97's Open Template Technology (OTT) enabled her literally to modify how the tool generates code. Effectively, McRae was able to teach it her programming standards. "I needed to add code (and a Windows API) that would call the sign-on program and then cause the program to "sleep" for a few seconds to allow the user time to sign on. It is working perfectly."

McRae says this ability dramatically enhances her productivity. "With this ability to change your code in a template, you can add any piece you need, create multiple templates for different needs and never have to modify the code through the Visual Basic application. This means speed, ease and uniformity... all VERY important. Now I'm writing my code only once - then the tool generates the applications that way over and over again."

Indeed, McRae feels that the ability to teach a RAD tool how to generate code makes all the difference in the world. "I'll use any tool that makes my job easier. But if it constrains me - if it won't let me do what I need to do, I'm not going to use it. I don't care how great it is or what bells and whistles it has. Because if it constrains me, it's not making it any easier for me. But I can use mrc's tool. It writes code the exact way I want, and it does it every time. It's always bug free, always tested, always going to work, and I can have as many of them as I want."

This flexibility, McRae says, translates to less problems with users. "If I didn't have the ability to modify mrc's templates, I would have had to live with these problems. That would have meant explaining to my users why an application doesn't work the way they expect it to and how they'd have to work around the problem. Or I'd have to modify every project that I built to fix it. No other tool gave us this ability."

Teaching Visual Basic to RPG Programmers

Another key requirement to Collins and Aikman was that their development platform assist the RPG-only programmers make the transition to client/server. "With client/server systems," McRae says, "the database structures are different. all your tables are interconnected. You have rules, constraints and triggers. The AS/400 is very good at that. I wanted something that will teach the other programmers Visual Basic, object oriented programming, graphical user interfaces."

She adds that simply showing the other programmers samples of Visual Basic applications wasn't the best teaching method. "They would start the Visual Basic application and it would be all Greek to them. It's all new - a big learning curve. It makes sense, but they can't relate it back to something they understand."

The ability to build Visual Basic applications on the AS/400 via mrc's green-screen interface helps the programmers learn in a familiar environment. "From the green screen they can pick the files and fields they want to use and what they want to do with them. It's more like AS/400 tools they've already used. Then it writes the RPG and Visual Basic code for them. So, they can pull up the project and look at the code behind it."

Once they see how their RPG logic translates to Visual Basic, learning becomes much easier. "First they generate the code in a green screen environment that they're familiar with. They know how the RPG program works. Now they can go into this Visual Basic project and look at that code. It helps them understand."

The View from Mount Everest

"Absolutely everyone was thrilled with it. They were not aware you could do all this on the AS/400. It's as if you lifted these people up from the valley floor below and placed them on top of Mount Everest. They were almost overwhelmed."

 Collins and Aikman Floorcoverings did not need a sermon from the temple mount to be convinced that distributed computing was the way to go. But, given their real-world IS limitations, they did need some assistance from technology to show them the best way to get there. And according to McRae, the journey was well worth it. The thanks is flooding in from the users. "Absolutely everyone was thrilled with it. They were not aware you could do all this on the AS/400. It's as if you lifted these people up from the valley floor below and placed them on top of Mount Everest. They were almost overwhelmed."