Product Modernization Case Study

Customer: DAO Route Accounting Systems, Chesapeake, VA
Industry: Manufacturing (Food)
Business Challenge:

Customer is a software products company. They have developed multiple software products for the Food Distribution industry during the past 18 years. The legacy application used for managing the operations of Snacks Distribution businesses has several modules such as Inventory, Routes, Jobbers, General Ledger, Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable. Customer had to re-engineer the legacy application and build a web-based product. Some of the business challenges are:

• The user community could not wait until all the modules are converted to the new system
• Though the new system is web-based, we had to ensure the end users (trained in the old application) could work easily in the new system with minimal or no training. For example, the users should be able to use the same keyboard shortcuts (that they used in the DOS-based system) to perform various functions in the web-based system

Ivesia Proposed Solution:

Ivesia proposed a strategy to re-engineer the legacy system and incrementally build and deploy the new web-based system. As the modules were re-engineered and converted to web-based technology, they were deployed to co-exist with the legacy DOS-based product talking to the same back end database. Since the new system is developed in Java and the legacy database was in Clipper, we used Java-COM bridge layer to talk to Clipper. Reports were generated using HTML and PDF formats.

Ivesia had designed and developed the web-based screens to respond to all the shortcut keys used in the legacy system and this minimized the training requirement.

Business Benefits Achieved:

• Customer can maintain market share since the web-based system was made available on time.
• End users were given the web-based system incrementally in shorter turn around instead of waiting for the entire system to be converted.
• Users did not require training to use the new system and hence the training costs were down and application adoption was high.