Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

What do you know about UPC codes used within the United States? What about the codes used everywhere else? And, more important, why should you care? Please read on. If your company does manufacturing or retailing in the United States or Canada, you should be familiar with the 12-digit UPC codes for product identification. However, the rest of the world is singing a different tune, and uses something called the EAN-UCC system.

The governing body for UPC codes, the Uniform Code Council, has determined that, on January 2005, the EAN-UCC system will become the worldwide standard for product identification. The new standard for product identification will be the EAN-8 and EAN-13 digit numbers, and in some cases the EAN-14.

According to the Uniform Code Council, U.S. companies may continue using the 12-digit UPC code in order to produce barcodes. No problem there--at least not in the short term. It has yet to be determined whether the UCC will make EAN-compliance a requirement for granting new codes in the future. It's also possible, if you have foreign suppliers, that changes in their UPC coding could disrupt your supply chain. Either of these potential occurrences makes it worth considering whether your IT systems will handle incoming imported products with identifier fields that do not match the 12-digit code. (For more information about the UCC deadline, go to the UCC Web site.)

Readying your iSeries and AS/400 software applications will require the expansion of the UPC fields. That involves identifying all occurrences of UPC fields throughout the applications; modifying programs, files, and other objects; recompiling them; and rebuilding the logical file relationships. If you went through Y2K compliance, this may sound somewhat familiar.

That's what the development group at Advanced Systems Concepts thought. ASC had developed a code conversion tool for Y2K, so it was adapted for the UPC code conversion. The original tool was geared for expanding eight fields. This iteration, called the ABSTRACT Conversion Utility, was designed to handle any field expansion. It is a module for ASC's RPG development tool, called ABSTRACT. The ABSTRACT Conversion Utility costs between $5,000 and $6,000, depending on the size of the iSeries used for development. Pricing for ABSTRACT is also between $5,000 and $6,000.

ABSTRACT Conversion Utility provides source manipulation of database fields. It shows, for example, how specific fields are manipulated within programs (such as in work fields or data structures) and are then passed as variables to external programs. It also automates many of the most time-consuming tasks related to field expansion projects. For instance, it will generate a member-level impact analysis, expand database fields within affected objects, convert data, and recreate object relationships.

According to Chris Wilson, director of programming tools at ASC, ABSTRACT Conversion Utility will save programming time in the long run for many companies with supply chains outside of the United States. Combined with ABSTRACT, ABSTRACT Conversion Utility becomes a useful cross-reference tool for finding core information. "It analyzes database fields, files, and programs. It tells you how those items relate to one another, the hierarchy, and where things are used." Wilson says.

"For instance, it tells you this UPC code is used by this program. It also tells you how the program manipulates that field once it gets it, which is important to know when doing field expansion. Often, fields get manipulated inside of programs and are used as part of data structures, for instance. There may be adjustments that need to be made within the program to make it work properly--expanding data structures and arrays. It's tedious programming work. Objects outside of the programs--things such as display files and printer files--are affected as well. Some manufactures might have the UPC code in, for instance, 200 places in their files. They may not even know where all the fields are. ABSTRACT Conversion Utility helps them find where all the fields are located."

One product that is similar to ABSTRACT Conversion Utility is X-Analysis 4, from Databorough Services, a company based in England with offices in Canada, France, and India. Another company, BluePhoenix Solutions, offers a combination product and service called UPCEnabler, but it does not involve RPG application expansion. (For more on Blue Phoenix, see "BluePhoenix Launches New UPC Remediation Tool."

Some companies don't use UPC codes, or only have limited use of them, Wilson says. For them, this is not important. For companies doing this project, it is possible they could have several months' worth of programming involved in this code-conversion process. It's those companies that ASC hopes will be interested in its revised Y2K code-conversion product.