Architectural lighting manufacturer Focal Point, LLC, has grown exponentially in fourteen years. By adroitly plugging in to the commercial real estate construction upsurge, Focal Point has morphed from a start-up, to a visionary supplier of commercial lighting design elements. Its expansion has been entirely organic, and today, Focal Point’s customer list reads like a chapter from the Who’s Who in Business. Bank of America, Excelon, ATT, General Motors, Chrysler, Microsoft and MTV all use Focal Point’s European inspired lighting fixtures at key facilities. Recently, an airport billed as the world’s most advanced — Doha International Airport in Qatar, selected Focal Point from an extensive list of vendors.
Focal Point, based in Chicago, handily manages it’s thriving business with a single IBM System i model 520 running BPCS ERP.
When the company was first formed, five people accessed this system. Today, it supports the activities of 60 online users. And, to their credit, the company’s entire IT operation is overseen by a CIO, one RPG programmer, and one operations technician.
“The learning curve for order entry has gone from months to a few days. Now we can focus on building strong relationships with our customers rather than spending time searching for order information.”
As Focal Point grew so did their catalog of products. Over time, their order entry process became ungainly, requiring technical service representatives to toggle through several different 5250-based order entry screens using numerous function keys. Often times, lighting contractors would call Focal Point’s customer service department from job sites with questions regarding their orders. Sometimes, the fast answers they sought wouldn’t come because they’d call without knowing their order or purchase order number, an essential bit of information needed to locate the details of a shipment. In instances like these, it could take up to 20 minutes for one of Focal Point’s reps to locate the right information.
Focal Point’s BPCS-based OE system was also difficult for new employees to understand. According to Margaret Thornton, Focal Point’s CIO, “An inch thick reference manual helped new users get accustomed to the monster we created. They really had to learn the ins-and-outs of this system before they became productive and sometimes it got frustrating.”
With a keen interest in streamlining the order entry process and reducing the amount of time needed to track down specific order information, Thornton began to weigh her options. Vendors who offered order entry systems, and others who sold web modernization tools for the System i approached her with their wares. One of the systems presented to Thornton carried a price tag of $75,000 and would require weeks of services work. Others called for extensive training, or produced applications that had to be maintained with the proprietary tools used to create them. In the absence of a standout option, she settled on IBM’s WebSphere. “I needed to move forward on this project. We received a WebSphere license with the 520 so that’s the direction we chose.”
Several months had passed as Focal Point’s sole RPG developer retooled an important configurator program that estimators used to calculate fixture and ballast requirements based on lineal feet. During that time, little progress was made on the new order entry program. In May, 2008, in a discussion with a contract System i developer whom Thornton had used since Focal Point’s inception, she expressed how unnecessarily complicated their green screen order entry system was and how it needed an overhaul. The developer, who was now a trusted business ally, said his company — CNX Corporation offered a toolset that could be used to optimize the OE process and simultaneously produce the Web-based system she wanted in less than half the time that it would take if WebSphere were used.
A few weeks after this discussion, Focal Point unveiled their radically new browser-based order entry system that was built with an application development toolset that shares the chemistry term used to describe the force that binds atoms together. Valence (pronounced vā’ləns) from CNX Corporation, is a relative newcomer to the System i modernization arena that touts fresh thinking and an attractive price point of under $5,000 per System i server with no per-user developer fees.
Programs built with Valence are true Web 2.0 applications with RPG backend code. These apps function like a GUI and, ala AJAX, they do not re-render an entire screen when a single field is changed. “If you have ever made a purchase online you can enter an order in the Valance ViewPort, that’s how easy it is,” says Thornton. “*The learning curve has gone from months to a few days*. Now we can focus on building strong relationships with our customers rather than spending time searching for order information.”
Fresh thinking
CNX’s Valence modernization offering is an i OS adapted toolkit that incorporates a JavaScript development framework called Ext JS. Ext JS has garnered an exceptionally strong following over the past few years. Valence also uses JSON which is the data-interchange format used to create JavaScript Object Notation-formatted data files with data passed to it from an RPG program. This data gets displayed in a straightforward front-end grid which is much more efficient and faster than XML. Within this construct browsers don’t have to parse out the XML. Instead, data is instantaneously rendered in the display grid.
An impressive array of CNX developed code allows RPG programs to communicate with the JSON front-end and Web portal — the Valence ViewPort, as well as a real-time charting application. Valence is self-contained and plugs into the Apache Web server. Says Thornton, “We wanted to continue developing and maintaining applications in RPG and preserve the underlying database functionality, but needed a modern Web 2.0 user interface. If we just wanted to convert green screens we might have pursued some other technology. Valance is really the only product that gives us the functionality we need and does it natively on the System i.”
Faster than light
Focal Point’s new OE system allows users to search for specific order information in several ways including order status, partial PO numbers, customer name, and other parameters. If necessary, schematics can be called and displayed in the Valance ViewPort. And because JSON is used instead of XML and hence fewer characters are involved, order queries produce instantaneous results.
Resizable panes and content areas that adjust to the size of data fields give the user interface more plasticity than competitive tools. And according to Thornton there are many other features in their new OE system that make life easier. “Now we can view an exact replica of the order on the desktop. We couldn’t do that in the old system. You had to flip through several screens. Now can see it in the exact format that it’s going to show up in the agent’s inbox.”
The Focal Point OE application also features popup windows, dynamic drop-down boxes, type ahead capabilities, and trees. Dynamic 3D charts based on DB2 data can be presented instantly in the Valance ViewPort.
Solid foundation
Focal Point also uses a suite of snap-in tools from CNX designed to augment BPCS. ATOMIC, an acronym for Automated Total Order Management and Inventory Control, streamlines ERP processes. ATOMIC includes modules for shop floor management, RF inventory control, interactive MPS, label management and more. “Over time, these programs have made Focal Point much more efficient and they set the foundation of trust between our two companies,” notes Thornton.
ATOMIC’s components run in a 5250 green-screen environment but in the near future, CNX will release new versions that support the Web 2.0 paradigm. Once these updated applications are implemented at Focal Point, 85% of their business apps will be Valence based and browser accessible.
Thornton is now in the process of replacing most of Focal Point’s remaining ERP applications with ones written in Valence. Given the dismal track record throughout IT of legacy system rip and replace projects, she says that all undertakings within her purview must have a positive outcome. While anxious to get several new Web 2.0 applications in place, she’s taking a gradual stepped approach to phasing out her existing green-screen code. This “extend and enhance” strategy carefully takes into consideration how work flows through Focal Point’s organization and how users interact with each application, “CNX is helping us keep our exposure at near-zero. This is really a low-risk transition and I’m impressed with the level of continuity and accountability that CNX has brought to this project.”
While Focal Point’s favorable market position stems from a keen eye for design and lighting industry market knowledge, Thornton attributes some of the company’s success to CNX Corp. “The very bright people at CNX have helped us get to this level,” she says. “You have to see Valance for yourself to really understand how valuable it is.”
See video demo of Focal Point’s System i BPCS ERP Applications’ Integration with Web 2.0 »