No connection to corporate assets
While the application greatly improved efficiency in the field, there was no connectivity to the AS/400 systems in which critical customer information is stored. Orders collected in the field were printed out and manually keyed into an AS/400 system where credit worthiness was checked and an order confirmation generated. The manual order input for a single order could take up to 40 minutes.

The immediate problem was the drain on Atomic's employee resources. The time spent manually typing in orders was becoming a liability. Accuracy was another big problem. Atomic offers its customers discounts based on over a dozen variables that are calculated using a complex formula. An instant connection between ePad and the AS/400 would reduce or eliminate the chance for human error and provide the accurate information to the salesperson's handheld.

As I said before, existing computer infrastructures contain significant corporate assets. In this case, all the customer orders and case histories of Atomic's customers were stored in the AS/400 systems.

Atomic USA's IT staff originally planned to develop the software to connect the two systems themselves. They knew they would need to integrate the two systems without major reconfiguration of their back end. Deciding in-house development would be too time consuming and costly, they sought out software already available on the market that would allow them to connect the legacy system without a major overhaul. This is how I came to be familiar with the company, as they chose to go with our eUnify software.

Making the connection
The first goal was to bypass the manual order-entry procedure. In addition to the immediate priority of order automation, Atomic plans to increase functionality between ePad and the legacy systems and wanted to be certain that the initial solution they selected would carry over to future legacy integration endeavors.

"We were concerned about altering our IT environment and losing all the power and capacity of the legacy systems we had invested so much time and money in developing," said Mike Williams, IT Director at Atomic USA. "Changing the legacy system at all was a challenge and a risk because Atomic has so much information and reports, most of which are critical to our business processes. While we wanted to continue to use cutting edge technology to our advantage, we also wanted to make sure that any advances affecting our IT infrastructures were the right ones because we have so much riding on them."

The installation began in March 2001 and was completed in two weeks. At the end of the first week, the order entry was automated from the ePad. One problem faced was the slow data link that was available to access the AS/400. To overcome the problem, the second week was dedicated to increasing the performance of the integration layer by tuning the system. Once the tuning was completed, the response time for entering each order item was made to be less than a second.