Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition--Coil Coater Forges Customer Gains with Self-Service DB2/400 Access

The coil-coating business unit of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, based CENTRIA used to rely heavily on faxing. As the company sought to close the gaps in its just-in-time supply chain, however, it replaced that decades-old communication technology with something more modern. CENTRIA chose ASNA's DataGate Component Suite to bridge its DB2/400-resident production data files with new browser-based applications, giving customers real-time status on inventory, work in process, and more.

CENTRIA's coil-coating services business unit processes bare steel coils for companies that make consumer products like metal garage doors, refrigerators, and light fixtures. It also produces high-end metal roof panels and a number of other construction products. The company keeps millions of dollars' worth of steel coils in inventory on behalf of its customers, then cuts, paints, embosses, and ships panels to manufacturers down the supply chain for further processing. Everything done to the panels is based on client specifications, and although CENTRIA is supported by an advanced computing infrastructure, until now it has been receiving instructions from clients by fax.

To streamline order entry, John Roth, director of information technology, wanted to create an interactive Web-based portal to give customers access to inventory data. This would let them initiate production processes, release finished materials for shipping, and handle other production-related issues. In doing so, CENTRIA would save money on administrative overhead, reduce the time customers spent managing materials, and create another reason for its customers to do business with the company.

"We have to try to keep in sync with the supply chain, or we end up with a whole lot of inventory, and we have to be proactive to increase communication flow, to keep everything efficient," explains Roth.

CENTRIA's customer self-service portal is now in beta, and is rapidly becoming a reality for production. When clients log on this month, they will be able to interact directly with CENTRIA's J.D. Edwards back-end and conduct business over the Web, with the only essentials on their end being a browser, a user ID, and a password.

CENTRIA's customer self-service site was developed by ASNA business partner Information Age Technologies, a skilled iSeries and e-commerce custom software house based in Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania. IAT has used ASNA technology extensively since 1998 and recommended it to CENTRIA for constructing the link between its JDE back-end, residing on an iSeries Model 830, and its Web-based application, developed with Microsoft Visual Studio.NET.

ASNA's DataGate Component Suite is an object-based, application program interface that integrates DB2/400, SQL Server, and ASNA's Acceler8DB databases with Web- and Windows-based applications hosted on Windows NT, 2000, and XP systems. DataGate Component Suite works with ActiveX-compliant development environments, such as ASNA Visual RPG, Visual Basic, Delphi, Active Server Pages, and many others.

Glenn Brown, IAT president, says the ASNA products are preferable to the alternatives. "Our experience with IBM's Client Access OLE DB driver was anything but satisfactory. Performance is poor, and the reliability of any machine with Client Access is suspect," he says.

CENTRIA's self-service portal application runs on a Windows 2003 dual-processor server, running Microsoft Internet Information Server, the .NET Framework, and the DataGate Component Suite, which integrates DB2/400 data. Clients with authorization can access the site and do four things: check inventory levels for specific types of steel coils that are on hand and available to process; slit, form, and coat raw material to client specifications; release finished materials for shipment; and provide instructions on what to do with steel coils that do not meet specifications.

After the user keys in final instructions, like manufacturing or shipping details, the order is passed to the iSeries machine and is processed. An order confirmation is then e-mailed to the client, in PDF format.

DataGate Component Suite consists of two software components: a database wizard program, residing on a Windows 2000 IIS server at CENTRIA, and a corresponding program running on CENTRIA's iSeries system that monitors an iSeries TCP/IP port and awaits communication from the Windows-based server.

Here's how CENTRIA configured the application to work. On the server side, a developer sets a pointer to the TCP/IP address of the iSeries machine. By making references to this pointer in the Visual Basic application, then referencing DataGate Component Suite DLLs in programs used to retrieve data from the iSeries DataGate Component Suite, the data to drive the VB application is drawn from several files on the JDE system, including Item Master, Lot Master, Inventory File, Sales Order Header and Detail, Work Order File, UDC Tables, and the F0101 Account Master File. As CENTRIA customers enter their instructions, supplemental request records are created. "We don't write directly to J.D. Edwards," Brown says.

CENTRIA customers will have direct control over what is to be processed and will be able to see exactly what's on the shop floor. "When the client reserves specific material, the shop floor immediately sees that it was reserved by the customer to paint. When it's painted, it is automatically placed in processed or finished inventory. When the client initiates shipment, the loading dock is automatically told to put this on the schedule to ship," says Roth. This improved visibility helps CENTRIA clients to better coordinate delivery to the next link down in their supply chain.

There's a virtual one-to-one correlation between DataGate Component Suite commands and RPG. Developers can set a record key value, and iterate through all the records that match that particular key. "It's the record-level access that gives the ASNA product all of its power," Brown says. "It's very fast. You can set the record key to just the record that you want to use, and it will access it instantly."

ASNA's DataGate Component Suite has added an important new dimension to CENTRIA's use of Web technology. "Our Web site that serves our architectural business predominately involves content management," Roth says. "This is really the groundbreaking application for us . . . the direct interface to our business system. Our customers will feel much more in control of their inventory."

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