About Client
The client is an established manufacturing giant based out of Baltimore in the US. With over 100 years in the business, the client has manufactured various chemical solutions/products majorly used in industries such as Furniture, Automotive, Medical, Packaging, Acoustic and other Consumer Products. The company is a large manufacturer and one of the first producers of flexible polyurethane foam, synthetic fiber, continuous filament fiber, low melt or thermal-bonded fiberfill, densified polyester fiberfill, a high-loft barrier made of modified rayon etc.
The client also claims that it forms the lowest density polyester foam in the world and is the market leader in acoustical foams. It also delivers environmentally friendly components to major international manufacturers. The company operates state of the art, computer controlled, statistical processes for quality control and product testing.
Industry Challenge
The Client was using a legacy application that was developed to register complaints from the customers or retailers related to the products sold by the client. The operator used to log the complaint and assign it to the concerned department. The authorised person from the department would verify the complaint and take further actions or resolve the complaint. The challenge faced by the client was that this was a desktop application built using VB that could not be accessed by people in the company from anywhere. This led to a lot of delays in problem resolution.
- The client wanted a web-based application on the IBM i system using the logic written in RPG only. The client also wanted to use IBM i credentials to log in the new Web-based application.
- The client asked to define the roles and access authority for the users. Such that the employees have limited access to the application features based on their roles/designation.
- Another requirement was to add a feature to send a mail with an attachment or PDF to the assigned person once the operator logs or submits the complaint.
- The database of the desktop application was built using MS Access, it had to be migrated to IBM i DB2/400.
The Solution
01.
Programmers.io immediately analyzed the problem and developed an action plan to accomplish the set goals. The client wanted everything on IBM i system, therefore, our experts suggested creating an Apache Server (inside IBM I box)
02.
As the application was to be web-based, the front-end was suggested by us to be built in Angular that could be easily deployed on Apache Server. Angular was selected by us as it works well with Java and builds user friendly and efficient front ends
03.
Angular is one of the best technologies that helped us build faster single page and a role based application. It was also used in calling the APIs in the backend and modify the application to be web-based
04.
Our IBM i programmers suggested the client use JAVA as a middleware for calling RPG programs using PCML (Program Call Markup Language)
05.
Using JAVA made many tasks easier and faster. The client wanted a feature to assign specific access limitations depending on the roles of the employees, so our team was able to assign users in the application who already had credentials on IBM i system
06.
JAVA helped in creating dynamic PDFs and emails could now be sent with attachments post complaint submission by the operator
07.
Our team migrated the database from Access by exporting data in CSV format and importing the CSV data to IBM i DB2/400
08.
JAVA program was used by us to migrate complex data to IBM i DB2/400
