Retail Supply Management

Customer Profile

A large company that offers a retail-focused ERP package. This package is a large, full-feature solution that provides retail supply chain management, warehouse management, retail data exchange, as well as various channeling options including Web, mail order, internal and external concessions, and store sale and ordering.

Business Challenge

The company’s application has historically been IBM i-based. However, many prospects were interested in deploying the application as a Web-based solution on Microsoft .NET Framework. The company quickly realized that a .NET Framework-based solution would enable the company to grow its customer base.

Specifications defined

When the company went shopping for a solution, the ideal application migration requirements included:

• Leveraging existing RPG into workable code running natively on the .NET Framework.
• The ability the run the application as a modern Website on Microsoft Servers—with the unique requirement that the application also provide effective interoperability with the IBM i.
• With many highly-skilled RPG programmers, a solution that would persist those RPG skills was highly desirable

Why ASNA?

ASNA Monarch is the only migration environment that fulfilled the company’s requirements. For this organizatiohn,

• ASNA Monarch migated RPG/400 or ILE RPG to Visual RPG for .NET Framework. The Visual RPG for .NET Framework produces verfiable, pure .NET Framework binaries.
• Having its roots in RPG, learning Visual RPG was a natural progression for the company’s RPG team. They were able to quickly be productive with .NET Framework because of their comfort with RPG.
• A Monarch-migrated application has superb interoperability with the IBM i. RPG program calls, the IBM i’s security model, and many RPG idioms work intrinsically with ASNA Monarch.

Implementation

The company leveraged ASNA’s industry leading modernization solution to migrate its application to .NET Framework. They used ASNA Monarch to transform the IBM i applications to native.NET applications. Using Monarch, they converted the interactive programss to .NET Web pages. The resulting screens were updated to give the application a similar look and feel. The majority of the application was transformed to a demonstrable Web interface in only nine months.

Business Benefit

The converted Web application runs on a Windows server as a standard pre-compiled Web site. The application communicates with a backend IBM i to run background programs and perform database IO. With this new Web-based application, the company is uniquely positioned to harness the strengths of both the IBM and Microsoft platforms.