Small Art Supplies Dealer Moves Up to iSeries

Published: October 24, 2006

by Alex Woodie

When it came time for FLAXart, a San Francisco art supply retailer, to move off its legacy HP3000 system, it had several options. Now that two years have gone by since it implemented an OS/400-based merchandise management system from CommercialWare, the small business is confident the decision it made was the right one.

FLAXart is a family owned business based in Brisbane, California, which is just outside the San Francisco city and county limits. Since it was founded in 1938, the company has focused on providing local artists with a wide variety of supplies, either through its retail location, or through its catalog business. More recently, the company has taken to the Web, which today counts for the bulk of its revenue growth, even though only 4,000 products are offered over the Web. The company tracks 38,000 SKUs in its store.

For years, FLAXart relied on a highly customized, Hewlett-Packard HP3000-based merchandising application to handle core back-office functions, such as order-entry, inventory management, and fulfillment. However, when HP killed off the HP3000 platform, the company was forced to move platforms.

The search for a replacement system began several years ago, says Howard Flax, the company's chief executive. Flax had several requirements, but was somewhat surprised at what he found. "We were looking for all-inclusive package from a company that had good credentials," he says. "There are not many people that provide a tool for a midmarket business such as ours." While one package he looked at excelled at order entry, it lacked depth in fulfillment, for example.

The financial stability of the vendor was another factor in Flax' s search. The old HP3000-based solution had been bought, sold, and renamed so many times that it was difficult to keep track of its evolution. By the time FLAXart moved off the system, technical support was very poor. "We were looking for a company with enough capital to be around for the next five years," he says.

Flax hired an outside consultant to search through the available options and recommend a solution. That consultant, whom Flax found through "a little networking and Craigslist," was instrumental in the success of the project, Flax says. "We're a pretty small company, and our management base is limited," he says. "There's only so much we can focus on with keeping eye on the day to day management of the company. Taking the time to research and implement the new system" would have been extremely difficult, he says.

The consultant recommended an OS/400-based solution from CommercialWare, a Massachusetts company that has been developing multi-channel merchandise management and catalog-management systems for decades. Flax accepted the recommendation, and the migration from the proprietary HP3000-based system to CommercialWare running on an iSeries server was completed with no major complications in the summer of 2004.

Since then, Flax has found the CommercialWare solution to be an "overall strong package," with particular strengths in multi-channel order entry and fulfillment. However, any solution you're going to be settling on "is going to have its wrinkles," Flax says, and CommercialWare is no exception. In particular, Flax is not entirely happy with the purchasing and sales reporting capabilities.

Before the migration, Flax wanted to minimize modifications as much as possible, even if it meant changing FLAXart's business processes to match the way that the new system did things. However, Flax elected to modify the fulfillment capabilities of the CommercialWare offering to meet the particular way that Flax wanted fulfillment done.

Now that the customization work on the CommercialWare implementation is complete, FLAXart is in maintenance mode. The company has one full-time systems administrator who handles the daily feeding of the iSeries, which isn't much. It took him a little bit of time to learn the ins and outs of OS/400 systems management, but now he has a good handle on the new system. Because the company is using a (mostly) vanilla packaged solution, it was able to eliminate a programmer's position, which saves some money.

As far as the iSeries hardware goes, there's not a lot to say, which is typically the case. "It just sits there and does its job," says Flax, adding that the cost was "reasonable." "We have nothing to complain about."

However, the desire for vendor stability was thrown a curveball earlier this year when CommercialWare was acquired by DataVantage for $13.2 million. However, that transaction didn't raise any red flags for Flax. "It doesn't make me reticent or insecure or have second thoughts," he says. "We received assurances from CommercialWare that it was a good fit and allow both of them to be stronger, and thus far our relationship with CommercialWare has supported that."