General Fasteners wraps up customer service with LANSA
General Fasteners Ltd, the largest direct distributor of fastening, packaging, shipping, and flooring supplies in Western Canada, has improved customer service and reduced call center traffic with an online eCatalogue site built with LANSA Commerce Edition in only four weeks. Internal efficiency has improved with a Visual LANSA-based contact management system, called ‘Business Builder'. Both solutions integrate directly with a COBOL-based core iSeries system.
Jim O'Reilly, president of General Fasteners, says "With LANSA Commerce Edition we rolled the eCatalogue site out to the first users in the fifth week. Within three months our 300 largest customers signed-up, leading to immediate relief in our call center. And customers are buying more products, because they can see the complete breadth of product assortment. At the same time we have improved our internal efficiency with Visual LANSA. We get more quotes out and of a higher professional level than we ever could before."
"Our 300 largest customers signed-up within three months, leading to immediate relief in our call center"
- The Challenge
- Web Self-Service for Customers
- Windows Integration for Staff
- Conclusion
- Company and System Information
The Challenge
General Fasteners customers, and even
staff, have developed a better understanding
of the full product range because of the
site’s easy navigation and attractive
graphical presentation
About 70 percent of General Fastener's revenue comes from packaging supplies and 30 percent from fastening and flooring supplies. Most of the packaging supplies are sold to manufacturers, who use the supplies to wrap their product at the end of the production line.
O'Reilly explains, "We have a sales force of over 60 people visiting the purchasing officers of companies throughout the west. Customers placed orders by phone or fax, which required manual entry in our distribution system. Our call center also received a lot of inquiry calls concerning order and account status."
"We realized several years ago that a Web site should be a first step in improving customer service. We had several attempts at building a site, but it never came to a stage that was good enough to implement."
"First, we built a Web site with Visual Basic and Active Server pages, but the site was unstable and continuously exposed to viral attacks. Because our in-house developed COBOL-based core solution runs on iSeries, we had a lot of issues duplicating the data and keeping the two systems synchronized. The solution was awkward and we never rolled it out to our customers."
"Next we investigated IBM's WebSphere. But learning WebSphere and Java was difficult and the expertise required did not relate to our existing skill set. It was not productive and I would have had to double my staff to manage and run that type of installation."
"We also wanted to provide our internal staff with a Windows solution that could integrate with our core system on the iSeries and with MS Office."
"When we learned that we could use Visual LANSA to develop both Web and Windows solutions, we were really interested and decided to try it out," says O'Reilly.
"When we learned that we could use Visual LANSA to develop both Web and Windows solutions, we decided to try it out"
Web Self-Service for Customers
Order Check Out
General Fasteners purchased LANSA Commerce Edition and one month of LANSA consulting services. Most of LANSA Commerce Edition standard functionality was implemented, including placing and tracing of orders and stock inquiry. Customers can see their invoices, outstanding orders and statement balances and define multiple levels of security for their own staff.
"We were able to get a first cut of the eCatalogue site up and running in three weeks," says O'Reilly. "All we had to do on our end was develop a few small COBOL programs to interface with the Commerce Edition suite. LANSA consulting staff mapped our core solution to Commerce Edition. It worked well. In the fifth week, we rolled the site out to the first few users. We sell over 20,000 products and spent far more time on cleaning data and making product photos, than with programming."
Because implementation was so fast, General Fasteners' IT team did not really pick up the skills to develop and maintain the solution themselves, so a LANSA consultant came to their office for one week mentoring.
O'Reilly continues, "After one week of mentoring, we were able to support and enhance the eCatalogue ourselves. We learned how the solution worked and best practice LANSA coding. It gave an enormous boost in our understanding and productivity."
Charlie Roth, systems analyst at General Fasteners, comments, "Maintenance is easy. Recently we redesigned the entire look and feel of the site, with the help of a graphics-advertising firm. We took less than a week to update and implement the new site, which included adding many new navigational features."
"LANSA is well designed. Components and styles are called out of libraries, which makes it very easy to do a major facelift very quickly. The maintenance of our static site, which runs on ISS and does not interface with any data, is much more clumsy."
O'Reilly continues, "At the moment we are adding 10 new customers each day, which we can handle easily. It saves us a lot of work that customers themselves can create multilevel security for their staff saves. Also, hardly any training is required. LANSA Commerce Edition has been given a lot of thought and it covers our and our customers' needs."
"Within three months of implementation our 300 largest customers signed-up, leading to immediate relief in our call center. Eventually we expect that most of our 6,000 active customers will make the site their preferred way of placing orders."
"We already notice a 30 percent decrease in inquiry calls. We have 20 people in our call centers across the country, who are looking forward to providing real customer services rather than answering standard queries."
"Customers are buying more products, because they can see the complete breadth of product assortment. You can search by product group, brand and so on. Even our own staff has developed a better understanding of the product, because of the easy navigation and attractive graphical presentation."
"iSeries reliability is unparalleled," adds Roth. "LANSA for the Web on the iSeries gives users a quick way to access e-catalogue data as both the data and the Web site are housed on the same machine. We also have an easier time maintaining the site, which isn't as susceptible to viruses as our static pages. We still serve our static, or brochure, pages from a Win 2000 server, mostly to facilitate working with our design partner and to present a better target to search engines. We view these pages as non-essential and are willing to risk the failures associated with a Windows site - something we're not willing to do with our eCommerce pages."
"Customers are buying more products, because they can see the complete breadth of product assortment"
Windows Integration for Staff
Inventory Inquiry
Using Visual LANSA, General Fasteners developed a Windows-based contact management system, called ‘Business Builder', that allows sales staff to manage their accounts. Business Builder is integrated with the core iSeries system and uses the same COBOL custom price calculation modules to generate quotations directly into MS Word and MS Excel.
O'Reilly says, "We get more quotes out and of a higher professional level than we ever could before. We create a much better image for our customers. And because the sales staff are more productive, we can handle more accounts per person."
"Sales staff used to prepare their quotations using a variety of tools, which would vary in style and accuracy depending on the person. They had to retype product and price information, or copy AS/400 reports to the customer. They all started to develop their own way of getting the job done. The process was time-consuming and error prone. Sometimes the pricing and the description of products would be inconsistent."
"Over the years we built several front-end Windows solutions. We started with Gupta SQL, then Visual Basic and later C++, but the performance and ease of use just didn't cut it. Visual LANSA's performance is great. There are no real limitations once you understand how to use the product. It is as fully functionally a tool as you are going to get. You can do anything you can do in C++. LANSA is very productive and projects move ahead really quickly."
General Fasteners also uses Visual LANSA to help produce their printed catalogue. A Visual LANSA program extracts the data and images from the iSeries, in a similar format to the Web site, and feeds this to Quark desktop publishing software.
"We generate 80 percent of the catalog pages automatically. Previously it would take one person a full year to create the catalog, so we would produce it only every three to four years. The new catalog is of much higher quality, includes pricing and our full product range. And we can produce it in less than three months."
"To me this is a spin-off of building the eCatalogue and it shows the benefit of LANSA's integrated products and single skill set."
"We get more quotes out and of a higher professional level than we ever could before"
Conclusion
General Fasteners Ltd is the largest direct
distributor of fastening, packaging, shipping
and flooring supplies in Western Canada
"The three things that impress me most about LANSA are its speed of getting to the data, its easy maintenance and good support," concludes Roth. "LANSA's Web and Windows environments both have fast native DB2/400 data access. Central definition of components makes maintenance easy. And whenever we had an issue, we felt a real commitment from LANSA to get it solved."
"A single LANSA skill set lets us share Web and Windows development between three developers. And we find LANSA far more productive than COBOL, even though we have been using LANSA for only one year and COBOL for more than 15" says O'Reilly.
"The most important lesson we have learned is to invest in LANSA training to get your head around the proper way of development," concludes O'Reilly. "The more components and definitions you put in LANSA's Repository, the more re-use benefit you get. With each subsequent project, the focus is shifting more towards assembly of available and tested components."
"A single LANSA skill set lets us share Web and Windows development between three developers"
Company and System Information
- General Fasteners Inc. is a public company that operates in Canada as General Fasteners Ltd. Four divisions represent the core businesses - GF Packaging, GF Fastening, GF Flooring and GF Service. General Fasteners has 13 store locations in Alberta, British Columbia and Saskatchewan. Headquarters are in Calgary, Canada
- For more information visit: www.generalfasteners.ca
- General Fasteners has an in-house developed COBOL core system running on an iSeries Model 270.