Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

AccessVia is finding success for its custom sign-making software among national retailers. In the last month, the privately held Seattle, Washington, company has signed contracts with two prominent AS/400 shops, The Sports Authority and Staples, for AccessVia's dSIGN software that will allow the retailers to quickly change in-store signs and keep the correct prices on their shelves.

It isn't obvious, but those little signs along the shelves in supermarkets and other retail establishments are often a giant headache for their IT departments. Because of the way that point-of-sale and enterprise retail software packages were designed, changing a simple sign can be a daunting, multi-month process involving opening up an application and redistributing new code to every branch, according to Rod Claar, the product director for the dSIGN product line at AccessVia.

"In these larger companies, you will find that the label or sign definition is hardcoded into somebody's software, so to change a font or to move an object requires somebody to open up the code, test it, and redistribute a binary," or compiled object, Claar said. "It's tremendously expensive for an enterprise-size customer. . . . You're talking months of lead time."

AccessVia's dSIGN software addresses this problem by inserting a new layer onto the end of the sign- or label-making process. Before a sign or label is sent to a printer, dSIGN takes the original sign data generated from the existing retail or POS software and merges it with a new, customizable template, which is created using AccessVia's Windows-based WYSIWYG layout editor. Output is generated as PostScript or PCL, which are supported by most thermal or laser printers today.

The process used by dSIGN is similar to OS/400 output management products used in AS/400 or iSeries shops, such as those from ACOM Solutions, Enterprise Resolutions, or Quadrant Software, which allow users to customize documents such as invoices or purchase orders, generated by enterprise packages such as J.D. Edwards WorldSoftware or SSA Global Technologies' BPCS, except that AccessVia doesn't do the document management.

dSIGN gives local store employees the capability to change the appearance of signs, for marketing or other reasons. Additionally, because dSIGN pulls price and item description data from a store's corporate database, the software is also finding use in keeping the listed prices that consumers see in store aisles more accurate.

"A lot of retailers use the batch paradigm for things like price changes and promotions," Claar said. "They might send a batch price update, for a label-printing system, once a week. If they do price changes in the middle of the week and the store doesn't get them updated," then the prices consumers see and what they get charged for during checkout could be different.

AccessVia wrote its first custom sign application 12 years ago for a local Seattle grocery store chain called QFC. Since that first DOS application, AccessVia has signed more than 300 customers and has expanded the number of operating systems it supports to more than 17, including native OS/400 support.

Staples and The Sports Authority recently installed dSIGN to augment their OS/400 Merchandise Management System, developed by JDA Software Group. JDA is one of the largest providers of enterprise software for retailers, and AccessVia has several Merchandise Management System users within its customer base.

The Sports Authority has installed the latest version of dSIGN, Version 3.5, at each of its 199 stores, in 32 states. In addition to using the older client/server version of dSIGN (there is also a newer Web version, called Web dSignShop), The Sports Authority has laid the groundwork for future upgrades to AccessVia's kiosk and m-commerce (mobile commerce) extensions.

The Staples implementation, which has not yet begun, will include installing Web dSignShop at more than 1,300 stores. Dean Sleeper, AccessVia's chief executive, said the Staples implementation is significant because of its size and integration challenges. The Web dSignShop implementation will span Java 2 Enterprise Edition/HTML user interfaces, BEA Systems WebLogic on Unix, MQSeries messaging, using XML for data access to the Merchandise Management System software on the AS/400, various Windows servers, Symbol handheld wireless scanning devices. . . a veritable bouillabaisse of modern and legacy systems and devices," he said.

The client/server version of dSIGN and Web dSignShop are very similar, in that both use the same basic code for the server component. The main difference between dSIGN and Web dSignShop, which AccessVia started shipping in March, is that dSIGN requires a full Windows client on which to download the new sign or label templates; whereas Web dSignShop only requires a Web browser and allows the server to print directly to a printer attached to the thin Web dSignShop client.

AccessVia wrote dSIGN and Web dSignShop in C+ +; both will install natively on iSeries as OS/400 objects, Claar said. Currently, Web dSignShop requires Microsoft's Internet Information Server Web server, but the company could develop a version that will work with WebSphere fairly easily, in which case an iSeries will also be able to be used as the Web server.

Pricing for AccessVia's dSIGN, which recently won a 2002 Retail Application Developer Award from Microsoft, starts at a few thousand dollars. For more information, visit www.accessvia.com.