Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

Like many BPCS shops, Bridgestone/Firestone New Zealand had concerns about the way its ERP system handled spool files. The lack of sophisticated spooling capabilities required the company to insert hard-coded modifications into the program to manage documents. This worked fine, until the company prepared to upgrade the ERP suite, at which point the custom-coding would have required duplication in the new version. Instead, Bridgestone/Firestone NZ used a utility from Cosyn Software to solve the problem.

Bridgestone/Firestone NZ was formed in 1998, when Bridgestone and Firestone formally merged into a single company. Today, with more than 750 employees and annual revenues of about $175 million U.S., Bridgestone/Firestone NZ is New Zealand's largest tire company and the largest BPCS shop in New Zealand among companies that have the server located on the island.

Bridgestone/Firestone NZ is more than a manufacturer. It also serves as distributor and retailer for its products, and owns more than 70 retail outlets that serve consumers and some of New Zealand's largest corporate customers. The BPCS system, which runs on an older AS/400 Model S20, also supports the new tire manufacturing plant recently opened in Christchurch, New Zealand.

The company has relied on the BPCS ERP suite developed by SSA Global Technologies for more than 12 years. In 1998, Bridgestone/Firestone NZ upgraded from BPCS version 4 to version 6, the version that SSA GT required all customers to buy in order to become Y2K-complaint. As a part of that upgrade process, Bridgestone/Firestone NZ decided to spruce up its BPCS spool file management capabilities by hard-coding CL programs into the ERP suite.

Bridgestone/Firestone NZ decided to invest in the custom changes as it upgraded to BPCS 6 because the ERP suite didn't offer much beyond simple spool file management, said Mike Boon, an employee in Bridgestone/Firestone NZ's IT department. "It had the ability to control [spool files] by workstations and the output queues you want to send [documents] to," he said. "But it's pretty crude. It's not sophisticated enough to cope with assignments of a particular document in combination with the user who created them, to send them to the right printer."

When it came time to upgrade BPCS last year, Boon and his colleagues were not looking forward to recoding the spool file changes they had made in the previous version. "We'd been through the pain of managing it on a day-to-day basis," he said. "We said, 'There's no way we're sticking with this in our upgrade.' "

And so the search began for a suitable utility that could duplicate--or even improve upon--the spool file capabilities they had custom coded into their ERP system. Boon was a member of the local BPCS user group in New Zealand, so he asked some of the members what they used. As it turns out, most of them had chosen to implement the same product, a utility called Spool Manager/400 from Cosyn Software, of Auckland, New Zealand.

"The main developer of Spool Manager/400 is someone who worked in BPCS some time ago. It was developed for that particular need," Boon said." I know from personal experience in talking with the developer [Mark Herman] that he likes to keep up to date on the 400. [Spool Manager/400] is robust and optimized for performance, and as a result, there are very little problems."

Mark Herman, co-owner of Cosyn Software, said that he developed Spool Manager/400 to meet the needs of BPCS users and to fill in for the lack of sophisticated spool management capabilities in BPCS itself. "BPCS's spool manger was certainly--how should I phrase this--basic," he said diplomatically.

While Spool Manager/400 was developed with BPCS in mind, its capabilities are universally applicable to just about any OS/400 program. The utility has two major functions, according to Cosyn: managing spool files in real time as they appear on the output queue, and managing downstream bulk printing and purging of files left on the system. Cosyn said Spool Manager/400 creates a single point of control over spool files and their attributes and eliminates much of the manual intervention required by AS/400 operators to manage spool files.

In any event, Boon looked no further. Bridgestone/Firestone NZ installed Spool Manager/400 (and two related utilities) when it upgraded to BPCS 6.1.01, averting the need to replicate the custom CL programs they had in the previous version. Boon estimates that, had the company not installed Spool Manager/400 (or a similar product), it would have required an additional 10 to 15 days of development and testing to bring the company's BPCS spool file capabilities up to speed.

Boon said Spool Manager/400 will also make future upgrades easier. "The process of understanding spool files is now external to the BPCS application," he said. "The only things to consider in an upgrade are the names of new documents."

At the same time that Spool Manager/400 was installed, Bridgestone/Firestone NZ installed two other products that extended the capabilities of Spool Manager/400, including Catapult and EZ-Pickens, two utilities from Cosyn's business partner, BCD Int'l, of Chicago. Catapult monitors output queues, converts spool files to PDF, RTF, or HTML formats, and then e-mails the converted document. EZ-Pickens works with Catapult to extend the file conversion capabilities to popular spreadsheet formats, including Microsoft Excel, IBM Lotus 1-2-3, dBase, and others.

While Bridgestone/Firestone NZ has not yet fully implemented EZ-Pickens (it already had an online analytical processing installation with an extraction, transformation, and loading tool that duplicates some of EZ-Pickens' functionality), it has put Catapult to use. Today, Bridgestone/Firestone NZ uses Catapult to send invoices to tire dealers electronically, as well as to distribute internal reports, such as sales reports, via e-mail.

The combination of Spool Manager/400 and Catapult has given Bridgestone/Firestone NZ new ways to correspond with its customers. "Our customers range from small businesses to large national organizations," Boon said. "Some customers still want their invoices printed, but some have registered for e-mail. With Spool Manager/400 and Catapult, it made it a lot cleaner to manage."

In the future, Bridgestone/Firestone NZ may use EZ-Pickens to present data from the manufacturing resource planning area of BPCS to the company's online analytical processing installation tool, TM1, which is developed by Applix. Management will decide whether to implement Boon's plan. "If you were a smaller company and had Excel," Boon said, "I would say it [EZ-Pickens] is a steal for receiving the spool files and passing them over."

All told, Boon was quite optimistic about the new capabilities the three new utilities brought to his shop, and said the company achieved its return on investment fairly quickly. Considering that all three utilities were had for less than $10,000, which is approximately what it would cost in the United States to hire a consultant to modify the BPCS spool files (and Boon estimated it would have take 10 to 15 days of work to do it in-house), the ROI can be reasonably estimated to be about three weeks.

In the near future, Cosyn Software plans to expand its reach to the United States. The company is involved with an Australian organization called the International Software Distributor Network, which specializes in bringing OS/400 software developed by Australian and New Zealand companies, such as Snapshot400, to the United States. Herman said the plan is to establish a subsidiary stateside to support and distribute the company's suite of systems management products, which, besides Spool Manager/400, includes a paging and operations automation utility called Powerpage/400, and Audit Trail/400, which tracks changes made to the DB2/400 database. For more information about Cosyn Software, go to www.cosynsoftware.com.