United States [change]
Case Studies
Chain Level Planning System
Industry
Manufacturing, Retail and Distribution
Business Solution
IBM & Open Solutions
Products and Technologies
- Java/J2EE
- IBM zOS mainframe
- IBM WebSphere 6.0
- IBM DB2 8.0.x
- AJAX
- Apache Struts
Company Overview
The client is a leading specialty retailer whose merchandise is sold in retail stores throughout the United States and through catalogs.
Business Challenge
The client determined that it was time to move their merchandise planning systems from legacy mainframe systems to an updated platform. The first attempt was a reimplementation of existing functionality in a popular planning software package. While the system did provide the basics and some new benefits, the overall implementation failed. The client contacted Sogeti USA to do a custom reimplementation of the legacy system that would better fit with the needs of the merchandise planners.
Solution
Sogeti developed the Chain Level Planning System as a J2EE web application. Sogeti performed the requirements definition, architectural design, and development. The solution consisted of an Apache Struts-based web application connected to an IBM DB2 database, modeled after the legacy system datastore. Considerable time was spent optimizing the efficiency of user interaction, from the placement of data on screen to the nature of operations between the user’s web browser and the server.
Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) was used so that individual elements of the screen could be updated in real-time, as dictated by user changes to the data and the governing calculations for merchandise planning. The calculations were modeled as Java objects and were configured via metadata stored externally. This allowed the calculations to be easily modified as the user base redefined such operations as markdown values and stock to sales ratios. The effect of this combination of technologies lead to a user interface that was virtually like a desktop application, and yet was still server-based and could be reconfigured to do new calculations easily.
Results
The project met the goals of the client by educating their staff on new technologies, verifying that web technologies could be used as a platform for new internal applications, decoupling the user interface of the application from the datastore, and moving the Chain Level Planning System to a platform that would be more flexible and extensible in the future.