Polish BPCS functionality with LANSA
Restore the Brilliance of your BPCS software investment

LANSA information

Many BPCS customers have decided to stay at version 4.05CD or 6.x for a while instead of migrating to version 8. There are a variety of reasons for not moving to v8 in the short term … some customers tell us that they are looking for expanded functionality in areas not addressed by the net changes provided by version 8.

LANSA is a practical, affordable, and productive way to modernize and extend the functionality of your current BPCS software.

Unbeaten Path has learned that it is often easier to rewrite BPCS programs from scratch in LANSA instead of trying to modify RPG code or AS/SET programs. And, the LANSA approach frequently results in a more user-friendly application.

e-Commerce Intranet Extensions End User Access Client Server Extensions Native AS/400 Extensions

Other companies use LANSA to make end user access to BPCS easier, for example Atlas Copco's data warehousing solution.

A large number of BPCS customers have built client server extensions with LANSA's intelligent middleware and PC development tools such as Visual Basic, for example Shanghai Automobile Gear Work that also needed DBCS support for Chinese characters.

Of course many customers also need to provide rapid native AS/400 enhancements to BPCS, for example Nestle, Novartis, Schindler and ACI Laminates with LANSA award winning AS/400 and PC development environments.

Intranet Extensions

Sunrise Medical is a large international Medical Supply Company that uses the AS/400 as their core platform and BPCS for their primary business applications. As part of major restructure, Sunrise consolidated sales across all divisions. Sunrise needed a structured 'Workflow' environment to process 'Customer maintenance Requests' (from anyone within the organization) and route these requests through their Customer, Contracts, & Credit teams. Once a Request was approved a final submit would perform the actual updates to the BPCS database.

To glue this process together, Sunrise required a customized application that could be easily accessed by authorized users anywhere in the Sunrise organization. Since Sunrise already had an Intranet, a Web enabled application running on the AS/400 was the ideal solution. LANSA for the Web was perfectly suited for this, as the robust 4GL Repository driven development environment could generate the application quickly and web-enable it at the same time.

"This web-enabled solution has made the customer consolidation process easy and efficient for our users. Now that this LANSA for the Web has proven itself, we may web-enable even more BPCS functionality," concludes Mark Ludwig, Vice President Project Management at Sunrise Medical.

End User Access

Angelo Wink, IT manager of Atlas Copco Australia, explains how his company has used LANSA/Client to give BPCS a user friendly layer. "Basically you 'model' in the LANSA Repository how the user wants to view the data. For example, stock-on-hand information is not readily available in BPCS, it needs to be derived from four different fields. In the LANSA Repository we defined the stock-on-hand formula in a 'virtual field'."

"To our users the stock-on-hand figure now appears as a field in the Item file. The free-on-board price is calculated using information from the Item, Vendor and Currency files. Since LANSA knows about file relationships, we can make the free-on-board price available as a single calculated field to our users."

Angelo concludes, "The LANSA Repository makes it all fit together. LANSA is the glue between BPCS, end user reporting and our client server applications."

Client Server Extensions

LANSA is a very popular tool among large BPCS users in China, because of its strong DBCS (Double Byte Character Support) facilities. Shanghai Automobile Gear Works, Shanghai HeZhong-Carrier, Linde-Xiamen Forklift Truck Corporation, Smith Kline Beecham Pharmaceuticals and Chang Sha Cigarette factory all use LANSA Open, LANSA's intelligent middleware, to extend BPCS functionality. Most of these client server extensions provide transaction inquiry and maintenance facilities. Several also use LANSA/Client for ad-hoc end user reporting.

Linde-Xiamen Fork uses LANSA Open over an X.25 network to integrate data from remote branches in China.

Mr. Yang Xiao Dong, Computer Center Manager at Shanghai Automobile Gear Works explains "We use LANSA Open with Visual Basic for all our customization to BPCS. We have written new inquiry programs and reports that our BPCS v4 doesn't offer and provided better business graphics. Other applications replace the original BPCS programs and are tailored to provide functionality specific for our company. All the end users are very satisfied with the new programs."

Mr. Zhang Chuan Hong, Vice General Manager in charge of BPCS at Shanghai Automobile comments "With LANSA we speed up the implementation of BPCS and also solve many key problems during implementation. Without LANSA, we would not use the BPCS system so successfully."

Native AS/400 Extensions

Nestle, the world's largest food company, uses LANSA in several of its locations. Doug Horwood, Manager Information Services Nestle Australia, explains "For six or more years now we have successfully used a mixture of LANSA and RPG for extensions to our BPCS v4.05 Customer Order Processing, Sales Analysis and Sales Forecasting systems. These BPCS extensions are in the process of being used by other Nestle markets in the Asia Pacific & Africa region."

Novartis, a merger between pharmaceutical giants Sandoz and Ciba-Geigy, uses LANSA in many of its locations. Sandoz and Ciba-Geigy both used LANSA and BPCS before the 1996 merger.

Vitor Santos, MIS Manager of Pharma Novartis in Portugal explains "We use LANSA for an extension to the General Ledger module of our V4.04 BPCS system. The LANSA application analyzes budget, forecast and sales figures over several time periods using information collected with LANSA from multiple branches."

"We find LANSA easier to learn than RPG and LANSA applications are faster to develop and maintain."

Francis Heng, IT manager of the pharmaceutical division of Novartis Australia, comments "We have used LANSA for our Lots Control System and some smaller modules. The LANSA application extensions have been running without problems for a few years now."

Rolf Winz, manager of AS/400 development at Schindler (the world's largest supplier of escalators and elevators), explains "One of the major challenges we face is flexibility. The applications we develop need to interface with a mixture of individually modified BPCS versions and other applications used by our branches. LANSA's Repository architecture helps us modify and maintain our applications both centrally and locally."

"Secondly, we need to deliver our applications in Dutch, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Norwegian and several types of English. LANSA's multilingual facilities meet this challenge as well."

"But most of all, some of the applications we have developed are so big and complex, I don't think we would have done them with RPG."
ACI Laminates & Insulation in Australia enhanced the shop floor control and costing modules to increase their functionality and ease of use. Entry of data on the shop floor allows data to be captured and analyzed in a more timely fashion. LANSA's object oriented approach permitted the user interface to be more flexible and configurable for the individual operator.

Other subsystems developed with LANSA included Shop Order Variance Analysis, an enhanced Shop Order Notes facility and a replacement to the BPCS DRP (Distribution Resource Planning) warehouse replenishment programs which interfaces with the order entry system.

Without LANSA these projects would have been very expensive and would probably not have been undertaken. New software development became more a matter of analysis & design than of onerous code cutting. In fact in a small IT department like that at ACI Laminates, LANSA has been a major asset. Especially since LANSA for Windows compiles in seconds and then tests programs immediately on the developer's PC, instead of waiting for batch compiles on the AS/400.

LANSA information