Holter Verwaltungs GesmbH, based in Wels, Austria, is a wholesaler of plumbing fixtures and materials with more than 400 employees, annual revenues of €100 million, and 133 years of history. Having successfully navigated nearly a century and a half of technological and economic changes, Holter remains a family business, now in its fifth generation, with a strong commitment to its staff and a forward-looking management approach.

Today, in order to maintain its leading market position, the company is evolving its IT systems with ASNA products. With ASNA's Visual RPG for Microsoft .NET (AVR) as its development platform, Holter maintains a modern corporate image, gains enhanced internal agility, and preserves and leverages valuable IT and human resources.

Moving Beyond the Green Screen

Markus Hiegelsberger, Holter's IT manager, heads a development staff of programmers, each of whom has at least ten years of experience at the company. These programmers provide the support for Holter's IT infrastructure, which includes an iSeries Model 520 with 3300 cpw, a Citrix Metaframe Server with 150 Igel thin clients, approximately 50 PC workstations and 50 laptops, and Tablet PCs carried by sales representatives. In-house programming staffers developed Holter's own green-screen ERP system with RPG beginning in 1983, and they continued to develop green-screen applications for more than 20 years.

Eleven years ago, Holter was the first company in Austria to run a Web shop on the System i. The Web application, accomplished with RPG and CGI, continues to perform — 40 percent of all orders are placed on the Web, and the site receives about 700,000 visits per month. Holter's management team saw the benefits of a graphical user interface. "We had 1,000 new Web users, and it was not necessary to train them, so we started to develop programs with a browser interface for our own staff," Hiegelsberger notes. However, he adds, "When the applications became more complex, it was very difficult to continue with RPG and CGI. So we decided to use object-oriented programming."

At the same time that Holter's managers saw the value of developing browser-faced programs for internal use, they also recognized the necessity of moving away from all green-screen development. The wholesaler had successfully employed eprogramming and the Web interface for customers, and the management team now wanted modern-looking, graphical applications for internal users. "The application was 25 years old in many cases. That means the user interface was also 25 years old. The company had a great deal of experience with the application, but we wanted to have new features, including Windows screens and graphics," Hiegelsberger explains.

The desire to develop browser interface applications for internal users was just one aspect of Holter's need to find a strategic decision for development into the future. The company had determined that the prior technology environment — ILE-RPG and WDSc — would not provide the kind of solutions it needed for the challenges ahead. So about two years ago, Holter began to look for a new development platform — one that would increase the power of its Microsoft client and server platforms while providing for the continued use of existing System i applications in the new schema.

Hiegelsberger explains that the goal was to provide in-house users with up-to-date solutions and to give the company's business partners the data they needed to make offers to their customers. The sales people wanted a new, more powerful customer-management system. In addition, Holter's leaders wanted to project a more modern perception for the company to aid in employee recruitment and retention. Hiegelsberger wanted to preserve existing developers' knowledge and company experience on a strategic platform that would help solve the present and future programming challenges of the business.

Quick Evolution While Preserving Resources

The executive management team asked Hiegelsberger to decide whether to continue with development on the System i or to move to Systems Applications and Products in Data Processing (SAP). He opposed the SAP option for the following reasons:

• It would require the complete redevelopment of applications and the presence of consultants for an extended period of time — hence it would be very expensive to install
• It would be expensive on an ongoing basis because of the additional hardware requirements that would be needed to run SAP applications
• It would not satisfy the need for agility in meeting new market requirements quickly and efficiently
• It would zap the company's autonomy and control

The employees were happy with the System i and the existing databases, business logic, and well-functioning applications that were familiar to developers and users alike. The goal was to extend them into a Windows-like, graphical environment.

Hiegelsberger says he chose not to pursue a WDSc solution because he did not believe it would adequately support the company's future efforts. He expected only the Java and .NET environments to survive over the long term and preferred to move to one or the other directly.

The IT manager says he also did not seriously consider using Java. "When we started Web programming, Java was never heard of on the iSeries," he notes. The cost of a Java development effort — in hardware, training, and ROI — were difficult to predict, and Hiegelsberger feared that they would be excessive due to the cost of training his RPG programmers in Java.

Hiegelsberger says he did not initially seriously consider development with .NET because "it seemed to be a strange syntax, not like RPG." While evaluating Visual Basic and C#, though, he looked again at AVR, became interested, contacted an ASNA partner to learn more, and, as he puts it, began to "understand the possibilities."

The Selection of ASNA and AVR

"ASNA products offered the advantage of saving the human resources of our developers as well as the investments that we had made in the System i over the years to reach the next generation of business solutions," Hiegelsberger says. "We selected ASNA products because the move to .NET is done quickly. The products we build meet industrial standards and are of high quality. The main focus is to improve the knowledge of our staff to work on a modern and strategic platform."

Hiegelsberger outlined his reasons for choosing ASNA and AVR as follows:

• Developers' existing RPG know-how would be enhanced for use on a modern platform
• AVR and ASNA DataGate software would provide fast and reliable access to Holter's System i database
• AVR would provide a single development platform for all types of future projects
• ASNA products would allow Holter to move to .NET from a well-known base using well-known tools

Hiegelsberger contacted a local software partner for support, and Holter began development with AVR and DataGate in March 2006.

The Right Training for an Efficient Start

Christian Neissl of NiceWare IT, a local software partner and ASNA-qualified trainer, provided three training sessions for a total of five days of instruction in AVR. According to Neissl, the developers were initially concerned that they would have to relearn everything they knew — but after the first day of training, they found that they could use the same commands as with RPG.

At the end of the sessions, each of the four programmers was assigned a program:

• A sales customer-management system
• A route planner for sales representatives who carry Tablet PCs equipped with a GPS location finder and the ability to communicate with the company
• Overviews of product information and prices for management
• An information system containing articles about Holter products and services

Neissl notes that after the AVR training, he offered to help solve problems or answer questions that might arise during the development effort — but there were none. Within five days after the training ended, the route-planning program was complete, and within five more days both the product information/price system and the article information system were also ready to go. By the end of June, the customer-management system was finished.

Significant Incremental Improvements

For Hiegelsberger, the greatest benefit of working with AVR was that not everything was new for the developers. Since existing programming staff members could build on their own skill sets, the company avoided bringing in new employees and maintained its valued existing human resources. Since the programmers did not need to start from scratch, they became productive quickly and were motivated to undertake additional applications in AVR.

"Now we are able to do .NET projects with the same staff and in the same way as we did in the green-screen world. Productivity is on the same level," Heigelsberger says. "We expect to be even more efficient in the future because we can reuse the new programs and classes we are developing now."

Hiegelsberger points out that System i data, when presented in a modern Windows application with graphics and Web resources, is easier to access and operate and gives a clearer presentation of complex information.

In the past, the IT manager says, Holter's salespeople were not comfortable using their computers and tended to work on paper. Now that a GUI interface is available, they are using the available technology, and transactions are faster and more efficient, he reports. Excel integration helps users exchange data very quickly, and it saves substantial development work as well. He notes that the standardization of field-value checking using Help Provider and Tool Tips provides for dialogs with fewer controls and higher functionality.

"Developing applications for Windows is not a big revolution — it is an evolution by small steps," Hiegelsberger says. "For example, now when we merge pictures with our article files, we can do it with drag and drop, we do not have to enter the path, and we avoid mistakes in entering the path. When we look at sales, we can now see charts. We can integrate Excel and so forth."

Agility, scalability, ease of integration, increased productivity, and lowered costs are among the business values Holter has gained from replatforming with ASNA products, according to Hiegelsberger. "This is the way for the future," he says. "ASNA is not only the solution for one project — for Holter it is the solution for our complete further development."