Solution
IT Infrastructure
Industry
Electronics
Company
A large supplier of electronic parts and components.
Business challenge
The company was challenged by a largely manual order fulfillment process, using multiple mainframe systems and interfaces.
Order entry, customer service, and invoicing were all performed manually. For example:
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Part numbers were entered from a printed spreadsheet.
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Large orders were manually broken down into multiple smaller orders.
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Orders in progress were saved manually.
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Order history was checked using raw data.
Transition
The company’s business process transformation project started in Sept 2018 with a Design Thinking workshop and requirements gathering. The workshop allowed the team to discover use cases and required features. This provided the draft for the web application solution, identifying IBM’s Host Access Transformation Services (HATS) as the key component. The project would be delivered in 6 month sprints, with each sprint consisting of design, development, user acceptance testing, and development.
Deployment
The HATS Web application was deployed into production only 6 months after the project began.
After seeing the successful results from the first phase of deployment, the customer gained confidence in the expertise of the HATS team and extended the project to implement more features to this solution.
In each phase, the project has been delivered on time and within budget. With each sprint, the HATS team continues to add enhancements and features to address multiple use cases and user groups in different geographical regions.
Result
The HATS team continues to engage with the customer on this project, reflecting the customer’s confidence and satisfaction with the results seen so far. Results include:
COST OPTIMIZATION
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Optimizing and modernizing business processes and infrastructure with minimal cost
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Using HATS, the customer can now add multiple features to optimize their transactions without performing any change to their legacy Mainframe applications.
QUICK RETURN ON INVESTMENT
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Users have seen immediate benefits – in weeks or months, not years
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Involving the end user in sprint review and demos means that any user feedback can be implemented in later release cycles.
INCREASED PRODUCTIVITY
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Users now complete transactions using an intuitive UI, instead of having to remember numerous Mainframe commands, navigating multiple screens, and correcting errors. This means:
Learn more about IBM’s Host Access Transformation Services (HATS) at https://www.ibm.com/products/host-access-transformation-services
Discover and engage with the IBM HACP & HATS User Group at https://community.ibm.com/community/user/ibmz-and-linuxone/groups/community-home?CommunityKey=02ca7e54-2793-4fe1-867f-786e27caaac6 in the IBM Z and LinuxONE Community.