Fruit Distributor WOWed with Java Report Writing Software

October 5, 2010 Alex Woodie

Pandol Bros., a central California fruit distributor, has successfully deployed a new application that allows its partners to view the latest inventory and sales data from the comfort of the Web. The new app was developed with Web Object Wizard (WOW), a Java-based reporting tool developed by PlanetJ, and brought to Pandol through its work with CYBRA.

Pandol Bros. has a reputation for providing fresh table grapes and other fruit to North American stores all 12 months of the year. The company, which is headquartered in the San Joaquin Valley city of Delano, can do that by working with growers from the United States, Chile, Mexico, Peru, and Brazil. Some products are exported all over the world.

In support of this network of global operations is Pandol’s homegrown ERP system running on the IBM i platform. Pandol had initially adopted IBM‘s Net.data scripting language to create an extranet application that gave business partners access to data. But Net.data turned into a dead end for Pandol. In addition to a lack of functionality, Pandol’s Net.data programmer retired, and IBM ceased support for the product.

The company was forced to look for another way to make data available to its growers and customers around the world. That’s when Pandol decided to try WOW, a Java-based development framework that allows users to tap into existing RPG, COBOL, or CL functionality by generating SQL for accessing DB2/400.

Pandol’s new extranet site gives growers and customers the capability to view data relevant to their dealings with Pandol. This includes: inventory levels; products available for sale; yield by box; what has been shipped to date; inspection data, including photos; and sales price.

WOW has become part of Pandol’s development strategy, according to Pandol’s manager of information systems and technology, Larry Nottingham. “WOW is much quicker to implement than Net.data,” he says in a press release. “It gives us additional functionality, such as the ability for the growers to download to Word or Excel, for example, [that] we didn’t have to code ourselves. It was all already built in to WOW.”

Before licensing WOW, Pandol was already using a product that had been developed with WOW: EdgeMagic, the Java-based radio frequency identification (RFID) control software from CYBRA. Pandol also uses CYBRA’s barcode software, called MarkMagic, and since CYBRA is a WOW reseller for PlanetJ, Pandol decided to license the WOW software through CYBRA.