TradeSource

TradePower Inc.

For more than 30 years, Interstate Electrical Supply has been providing electrical products to residential, commercial, industrial, OEM, utilities, construction, and advanced technology customers throughout central Georgia and Alabama. With a staff of 100 employees and three locations, Interstate Electrical Supply differentiates itself by backing its 12,000-plus product line with highly trained local service and support staff.

Faced with growing competition in the wholesale electrical distribution industry, Interstate Electrical Supply was looking for ways to provide better customer service and more competitive pricing. Like any distributor, the company faced ongoing challenges in managing assets, minimizing operational costs, and managing margins to increase its growth and profitability.

Interstate Electrical found what it needed from TradePower Inc. The TradeSource solution integrates accounting, sales, purchasing, inventory control, warehouse management and e-commerce capabilities in a single application with real-time data access. TradeSource uses IBM DB2 and IBM WebSphere Application Server to provide a solid foundation for e-business that integrates information across the enterprise.

At Interstate Electrical Supply, everyone from workers in the warehouse to the chief financial officer uses the TradeSource solution. Its ability to present a unified view of the data ensures that all of the company's business areas -- shipping and receiving, accounting, purchasing and sales -- can get an immediate view of the information they need to do their work.

Interstate Electrical Supply is also using TradeSource to increase its warehouse automation. Interstate Electrical's warehouse employees use personal digital assistants (PDAs) with advanced RF barcode technology to perform operations they used to do manually, such as providing proof of delivery. Interstate Electrical is now working on applying this technology to receiving, put-away, picking, shipping, physical and real-time count, bin restocking, and warehouse location maintenance. This new level of automation provides several benefits. As warehouse employees scan information into the system, data files are updated in real time, providing other business units with an up-to-the-minute view of inventory. Data entry errors are also greatly reduced.

Interstate values the industry expertise that TradePower brought to the job. The wholesale distribution industry is large and complex, and a distributor of electrical supplies has very different business needs than one that distributes HVAC components or fasteners. For TradePower, building its solution on DB2 and WebSphere has been a major competitive differentiator and given it a compelling value proposition to take to small- and medium-size distributors.

AWG In-Store & Warehouse Technology System

MQSoftware

Associated Wholesale Grocers (AWG) is one of the largest grocery wholesalers in the United States and is the nation's oldest grocery cooperative. Founded in 1924, AWG prides itself on its commitment to quality supermarket merchandise and superior service.

AWG faced many technological challenges. Coordinating communication between corporate headquarters, the individual stores, and the warehouses was often a slow, inefficient, and error-prone process. Communication between the 31 stores and headquarters was conducted via modem, the warehouse workers relied on a one-way communication via pager watches, and weekly price updates were being faxed to each store.

AWG was looking for a faster, more efficient way to integrate communication between its variety of applications. AWG turned to IBM WebSphere MQ and MQSoftware Q Pasa! for a solution.

One of the first steps was to replace AWG's modem communication system with a sophisticated WebSphere MQ Integrator solution running on AIX. The system routed all the order, label, receiving, and suggested retail price data to the appropriate applications on the corporate mainframe.

Next, they created a voice collection application that communicates between the corporate mainframe, the warehouse Microsoft Windows NT servers, and warehouse worker headsets. WebSphere MQ and Integrator generate work orders and send the order requests to the appropriate warehouse, which speeds the workflow process and helps operators work more efficiently.

To address the need for a more efficient means of transmitting the weekly price updates, AWG implemented a price update application that provides stores with pricing update files for checkout scanners and shelf tag price labels for all weekly retail price changes.

To monitor and maintain its new systems, MQSoftware and Q Pasa! software reduce system outages and speed response times. MQSoftware is a worldwide provider of middleware management software geared toward working with and adding value to the IBM WebSphere family of products. MQSoftware's product development team quickly adapted to AWG's needs. It implemented MQSoftware Q Pasa! to address the problems AWG's software was facing. Q Pasa! provides a single point of access for all middleware components and technologies, and also features customizable dashboard views to see the interaction of these technologies at work. Q Pasa! has reduced the window of time it takes to respond to an outage from more than half a day (12-18 hours) to two minutes or less. Q Pasa! has helped them see issues before they become problems, and proactively address each issue before it impacts business processes or customer service.

PathWAI Solution Portfolio

Candle Corporation

AXA Financial, the parent company of The Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States, AXA Advisors, AXA Distributors, and Alliance Capital Management, was looking for a solution to control its technology costs, accelerate return on investment (ROI), and expand its marketing agility. AXA Financial turned to IBM WebSphere MQ software and Candle Corporation to solve its business and technology needs.

Looking for middleware that would more easily let it access data in its back-end systems, AXA Financial decided to move from a CORBA-based environment to one that leveraged message-based technology. The company chose IBM WebSphere MQ to streamline integration of key resources and applications in different systems. To extend that environment, AXA Financial senior vice president and chief technology officer Don Buskard says he chose Candle's PathWAI solution portfolio to optimize and accelerate each phase of the WebSphere lifecycle: building, testing, and managing the application infrastructure for accelerated ROI.

Candle approached the project by first assessing AXA Financial's infrastructure requirements, the leveraging industry best practices to develop a tailored solution using WebSphere MQ. A key part of this process was figuring out non-obtrusive ways to access information in back-end systems. Candle then designed a plan for deploying the solution to AXA Financial.

The Candle consultants worked with AXA Financial to define specific functionality for the solution. This functionality included the ability for Java-based front-end applications to access information in CICS and DB2 environments on the mainframe, and the capability to achieve real-time updates to data.

Candle worked with AXA Financial to validate its infrastructure design and help AXA Financial development teams to work within the design standards. Application performance and tuning services, including measurement and benchmarking, are also critical elements for ensuring performance and scalability.

Next, AXA Financial deployed Candle's PathWAI Architecture for WebSphere. AXA Financial used PathWAI Development for WebSphere to lower development and maintenance costs, and condense timelines while increasing project productivity. It also implemented PathWAI's management technology, PathWAI Dashboard for WebSphere MQ, to monitor AXA Financial's hub and provide a portal view to track WebSphere MQ's availability and ensure optimum performance.

PathWAI and WebSphere MQ are making AXA Financial better able to quickly add new applications to the enterprise. PathWAI has helped AXA Financial's WebSphere MQ deployment to run ahead of schedule, reduce development cycles and downtime risks, accelerate architecture testing and infrastructure development, and most importantly, free IT resources to focus on new initiatives.