Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

Southern Wines & Spirits, the nation's largest distributor of wine, spirits, and beer, and an IBM iSeries convert, made the decision that wireless could work for its sales force.

Maybe it was the sales force that convinced Southern Wine that wireless could work for the company by streamlining the sales process, saving time and money, and giving the team an edge over its competitors.

Either way, it was a gutsy call. Wireless applications are not exactly routine in the business world these days, despite several years of promises and forecasts of greatness.

Is this a breakthrough project? Here's where it stands, from the perspective of the project manager and the vendor that laid out the infrastructure foundation on which this project is built.

Steven Burrows, a vice president of business development at Southern Wine, is the guy with the bullwhip and the chair trying to tame this project. He has 2,000 sales people in the California operation—the largest single-state distribution company in the United States—and the idea that they can send and receive real-time information via wireless devices, not just order-entry information, but data that would include sales and credit history, order status, including processed orders and held orders, marketing and promotional materials, sales quotas, product pricing, and inventory.

Southern Wine has more than 300 suppliers and 5,000 individual brands, so the length and depth of this information retrieval would be substantial. This is a big application that needs some serious real estate. There are at least 50 screens in this application, and each screen provides list of new information. The scope goes beyond order entry.

Because the company had its own plan for what data would be most useful for its sales force, it dismissed the purchase of packaged sales force automation software that dictated how things are done. "We wanted something that would allow us to do things the way we do them now," Burrows said. "We wanted some piece of middleware that would allow us to continue [our methodology], regardless of how we do business on the backend, and yet bring it to the front end [the mobile sales force] in a familiar way." At the back end, doing the heavy lifting, as Burrows put it, is an AS/400.

In the middle is ADVANCED BusinessLink, a company with experience building systems using its native iSeries and AS/400 business solution, Strategi, a 100% Pure Java client applet that provides the browser-based remote access.

"ABL was the catalyst," Burrows said, "because they are in that middleware world that doesn't care what you run on the back end. As a result, we were able to take—reasonably quickly and within an affordable budget—our backend host and push it through a piece of middleware and put it into a Web-based client solution.

"For us this was just a beginning, not a destination. We wanted to find the middleware piece and develop our own skill set so we can add on more functionality. I don't want to have to turn to others to redesign this later. I want to have people who can do it in-house.

"ABL has already delivered what we could call version one and version two. Version one had 12 to15 key areas of functionality. Version two delivered a couple of more. We already did version three and four, which added new functionality, on our own with some oversight from ABL.

For Southern Wine, the challenge came down to writing its business logic applications, because it got the gorilla—building these non-connected, mobile applications—off its back. That job was ABL's.

Scott McBurney, ABL's point man for the Southern Wine project, describes the situation in colorful terms. "We got the coolest set of Legos the world has ever been handed," he said. Wireless applications are "more sophisticated, more complex, and they take more pieces than ever before.

"Typically an IT department doesn't have expertise in all the different pieces that have been handed to them in a wireless world—the implications of one network versus another, what security issues may be floating around, the implications of various handheld devices, the languages, the environment, the display interfaces . . . on and on."

Most AS/400 shops know RPG, but RPG won't run on handheld devices. The Southern Wine IT staff was faced with rewriting its business logic in Java. But, as McBurney pointed out, "There's a difference between learning to write code in Java and writing an application." For the Southern Wine IT staff, it involved understanding business logic with a different syntax. All the business logic that was put into this project was pretty dramatic. McBurney also noted that these applications are a combination client and host. The host applications were done in RPG, the skills that the IT department already had.

The final decision on what handheld device will be used is yet to be made. "We like the [Microsoft] CE devices from Intermec and Viewsonic," Burrows said. Some salespeople are using a Wintel device. All are in the subnotebook category and run off Flash cards with touch screens, no moving parts, no hard drives, and no CDs.

Every Southern Wine market is a little different when it comes to handheld device requirements. In California, for instance, the device may need more horsepower, because there are more accounts for the sales force to call on. Bigger markets require devices with more memory.

"The key," Burrows said, "is that the apps are written in Java." To his way of thinking, Java equals freedom. "I don't need to be on a Wintel platform. I can be on a CE device. I can be on a little iPac. I can be on a [HP] Jornada." ABL wrote the Java code for the infrastructure and trained the IT staff (four people in California, where the roll out has been initiated) to provide the support for future rollouts.

In its early research, Southern Wine found that most of the canned packages run on the Microsoft NT platform and are written in C or C++. "We paid a little bit more by going down this path with an AS/400-based system," Burrows said. "The initial cost of running an NT setup is less, but it didn't afford the flexibility, security, and stability we wanted. Our thoughts were that, if we could keep development costs and per-unit device cost right around $2,000 per user, it would be justify the ROI in a 24-month time frame. We ended up paying more than $2,000, but our math was pretty good."

"The evolution of this project," McBurney said, "would be in the business rules, which will keep in step with the business. It will be in the way Southern Wine chooses to use the tools in the future. All the Lego blocks are in place."