Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

Apria Healthcare makes house calls to 1.2 million different patients per year. Patients rarely get a glimpse of the home medical organization's size; they see only a homecare representative and the equipment or supplies in tow. Beyond the patient's doorstep, however, lies an organization with nearly 500 branches and 9,700 employees nationwide. Managing such a large organization requires considerable skill and expertise, and Apria's IT department exhibits both of these characteristics.

Apria has tens of millions of dollars invested in computing infrastructure, housed in the company's 100,000 sq. ft. facility in Lake Forest, California. There beat the hearts of 15 iSeries computers, several with multiple partitions and processors, the largest being two 16-way Model 890s. A 100 MB Ethernet LAN connects more than 30 Windows NT and Windows 2000 servers, more than 40 Citrix servers, and 500 workstations at its corporate office. Frame relay connects six additional remote iSeries machines, with three serving high-availability needs.

Apria regards IT as a strategic resource, enabling it to reduce costs, add value, and enhance service delivery. Apria's IT department, consisting of 140 people, keeps the company at the crest of technology's wave: Apria was the first vendor in the homecare industry with EDI to facilitate order entry, confirmation, and billing to top payers. In 1999, Information Week recognized Apria Healthcare as one of the top 500 innovative users of information technology and ranked the company among the top 10 in the healthcare industry.

Strategic to ongoing application development is a toolset from Aldon Computer Group, based in Emeryville, California. With these tools, Apria keeps track of all modifications made to several core business applications across disparate platforms in Lake Forest and elsewhere in the United States.

Kevin McLatchie, Apria's IS manager of technology, is responsible for researching, analyzing, recommending, and implementing new software and hardware. McLatchie doesn't believe that large development teams can work efficiently without an automated change management tool, because "too many developers are trying to work on the same software programs at the same time," he says. "One realizes things can get out of control rapidly, and then the developers spend more time cleaning up than actually creating new software." He adds that change management software allows the company to easily separate the software development process from the software delivery and deployment process.

For 10 years Apria developers assigned to the company's J.D. Edwards World software implementation had been comparing new sources with current production versions on their development box with Aldon Harmonizer. Initially Apria selected Harmonizer because it often made extensive modifications to new releases of JDE's ERP system and Harmonizer would allow them to compare JDE's current release with the vendor's new version and Apria's local production release to identify the differences between their modifications to the code and the changes made by the vendor. Apria would then use Harmonizer to merge the versions to create a new set of source and objects that combined both sets of modifications. The new program was then tested and moved into production.

Harmonizer improved Apria's parallel development efforts by allowing for a comparison of the work of several programmers working on the same piece of code simultaneously, and generated documentation on all changes. Workflow improved, duplication of effort dropped off, and the distribution of software changes became precise. "Whenever we'd contact them to ask a question, report a bug, request new license codes due to a machine change, or request an upgrade, they were always very able and courteous," McLatchie says of Aldon.

Year after year, Apria had grown in revenue and profitability. While the number of employees increased throughout the company, the IS staff remained about the same, mostly because of "technological efficiencies," says McLatchie.

To maintain parity with the businesses growth, Apria expanded its use of JDE inventory and fixed assets modules. Also, the company escalated the use of LANSA products for iSeries application development. Though the symptoms appeared slowly, Apria's IS department ultimately had much more development work to handle with virtually the same number of IS people, and productivity suffered. Because Harmonizer had been a valued asset, Aldon was asked in 1996 to prescribe something that would help relieve Apria's development headaches and further streamline the software upgrade process across numerous iSeries servers. Shortly thereafter, Aldon's Change Management System was installed.

Aldon/CMS adds additional control, automation, and auditing of all objects in QSYS. Beyond the compare and merge functionality in Harmonizer, Aldon/CMS automatically finds objects or groups of objects based on user selection criteria, and moves them to predefined destinations. It monitors authority assignments and, if necessary, creates authority. Advanced features also create or move all dependent or prerequisite objects. Aldon/CMS automatically performs data conversions, creates change documentation, and more.

Five years passed, and in 2002 IS management observed the increasing proliferation of new application development technologies: LANSA for Windows, Visual LANSA, LANSA for the Web, LANSA/Client, and other development tools. No centralized change management solution was in place to improve continuity and minimize confusion in what was now a complex, multi-layered, multi-platform development environment. "We needed a change management tool to manage the client/server development that we had been doing with a number of different [development] tools," McLatchie says.

McLatchie researched change management tools that functioned in enterprise environments. After several months, he decided on Aldon Affiniti, a multi-platform change management solution, because it could centrally manage development environments across all platforms and function cooperatively with Aldon/CMS. "Affiniti slotted in nicely with our current Aldon/CMS," McLatchie says.

Affiniti also adds to the functionality of Aldon/CMS, a single graphical user interface, and enables Apria's software development groups to implement a consistent, controlled development environment across multiple platforms. Cathy Coype, Aldon senior product specialist, says, "Affiniti further simplifies the process of managing versions across an enterprise. Technicians don't have to type a folder name of a path; they don't have to drag or drop it, only to drop it in the wrong place."

Through its support of Microsoft Source Code Control Interface (MSSCCI), Affiniti can manage a diverse array of software, so programmers can work in their preferred environments, while concurrently giving administrators visibility over all work in progress.

In four days, with the help of one Aldon consultant, Apria installed Affiniti; designed the environment structure for Visual LANSA, Java, Mercator, documents, and links to Aldon/CMS for JDE and other LANSA applications; configured Affiniti; and loaded Apria's environment and data. The technicians also tested the configuration and provided a training overview to 10 developers. "Since then we have only made a handful of calls to technical support for Affiniti," McLatchie says.

Depending on the developer's preference, Aldon/CMS or Aldon Affiniti promotes the iSeries LANSA Repository and 5250 objects for testing and production, and distributes objects to remote iSeries machines. Visual LANSA GUI objects are checked out in Affiniti and then promoted along with all dependent LANSA repository objects to testing and ultimately to production environments. The LANSA interface automatically updates LANSA tasks as well. Through IBSLink, Aldon/CMS manages the iSeries LANSA repository, so when an L4W or a VL developer checks out an object to his PC, Aldon/CMS automatically records the event. Mercator developers work in their IDE, and document management is done using the Affiniti GUI.

Have Aldon change management solutions had a positive impact on Apria's application lifecycle and business in general? "Our IS direction is very much led by the business needs, and therefore tends to have a very positive effect on revenue stream and business effectiveness," McLatchie says. The most important thing that Aldon/CMS and Affiniti offers McLatchie is "control over the change management process and confidence that the integrity of our software is being maintained," he says. "Also, using Aldon does save developers some time, as they don't have to worry about manually packaging and distributing objects."

Robert Gast is a freelance writer with several years of experience in covering information technology. E-mail at evantgroup@aol.com.