9.3. Bekins

A traditional moving and storage company since its founding in 1891, Bekins has been the typical brick-and-mortar company for generations. Highly innovative during its first years of operation, Bekins switched from horse-drawn carriages to motor trucks in 1903. Later, Bekins became the first company to build reinforced steel and concrete warehouses in Los Angeles. But its latest technological jump presented Bekins with its greatest challenge yet—adopting the Internet.

Bekins' vision was to provide agents and customers with Web-based access in order to place orders, view inventory, and track orders. Never having undertaken such a large development project, Bekins turned to a trusted name in the industry—IBM.

9.3.1. Who is HomeDirectUSA?

Technology demands for home moving are fairly low. Basically, we're talking about moving someone's household possessions from one place to another.

The HomeDirectUSA business, on the other hand, is a dedicated branch of Bekins that provides organizations with inventory and moving services. The company's markets are logistics and technology. In other words, HomeDirectUSA delivers products from the manufacturer all the way to the consumer. Generally, it involves large items that companies like UPS and FedEx do not handle. HomeDirectUSA handles inside deliveries and installations of complex equipment, and two-van deliveries of heavier, larger items, such as big-screen televisions.

Customers are perceived to be anyone who needs to move or manage inventory. Traditionally, the company's bread and butter has been catalog sellers and retailers. In the past couple of years, dot-com retailers have evolved as a growth area. HomeDirectUSA specializes in general retail products up to bigger business-support products, such as paper copiers, coolers, refrigerators, vending machines, and appliances.

Companies hire HomeDirectUSA to store their inventory in warehouses and then to deliver the products to consumers when the products are purchased.

9.3.2. Company Vision

With more than three dozen warehouses, 50 agents, and a host of e-tailers demanding Web-based shipment tracking, HomeDirectUSA embarked on an ambitious project to bring them all together.

The first priority was to build a Web-based application that would allow the company's agents and customers to track shipments online, anytime, anywhere.

Such capabilities could gain new Web-based retailers and greater customer satisfaction.

The second part of its technology makeover involved upgrading its order-management and inventory-tracking systems and linking them all together.

9.3.3. Initial Obstacles

With an ambitious plan in the works, HomeDirectUSA faced one small obstacle: No one in the IT shop was experienced with the Java programming language or in supporting the WebSphere Application Server. And the team had never delivered an application to the Web before.

“It was a really big challenge because there were a lot of unknowns. How many users do we need to support? How do we spec the hardware? What are the expectations in terms of performance? How do we handle customer service and technical issues that might arise. From a support perspective, we had to ask ourselves, 'What are we getting into?'” says Randy Mowen, director of data management and e-business architecture at Bekins.

From an architectural point of view, there was a learning process. The programmers had to learn the Java language and VisualAge programming. “We also had to change our programming paradigm and change our management process because now programmers working on the client and middle tier had to work with mainframe programmers,” says Mowen. “They had to interface with DBAs and understand the connectivity all the way through our architecture, and understand how to manage it.”

“Everybody had to understand what the impact of this application would be on their piece of the puzzle. We had some rough numbers of what we could expect, but the big picture really was unknown,” Mowen says.

9.3.4. Why Java Technologies

HomeDirectUSA chose the Java platform because it wanted a server-side application or programming language. “The decision came down to whether we wanted to write it in the Java language, Perl, or CGI scripting,” says Mowen. “We took a look at the servlet technology and really liked its efficiencies. We liked connection pooling, multithreading, and some advantages servlets had over straight CGI programming. Now there is fast CGI and some other things, but when we were looking, those technologies weren't proven. We liked the fact that server-side processing was available, and we liked how the Java environment supported applications,” he notes.

Another factor was the Java platform's ability to provide visibility or the option to create different types of EJBs, both stateless and stateful. Using VisualAge for Java, the company could easily control Enterprise JavaBeans in terms of connectivity and attributes. “Those properties can be defined within VisualAge for Java. We chose to work with VisualAge and WebSphere, so there is a seamless process for deploying objects once they are created,” says Mowen.

J2EE Technology

The development team designed and built the applications to be open and to take advantage of the J2EE technology. “In our development efforts, we are far ahead. We are using the J2EE standards to make sure all the pieces can talk to each other now and remain compatible for the future. We can see the potential. Once we start scaling this environment with different objects on different boxes, it makes sense to keep compliance so that we know we can support those objects. Having a standard makes it much easier to communicate among our array of computing environments,” Mowen continues. “We don't know if we'll be acquiring another company, being acquired, working with other customers, or becoming a trading hub. But if we know we are compliant, we'll be in good shape whatever happens,” he notes.

EJB Components

The development team's first application, shipment tracking, was servlet-based. Team members did not jump right into EJBs, and initially they also looked at the CORBA standard.

They looked at defining high-level objects in order to simplify some of the programming tasks. EJB simplified the programming tasks by allowing them to define EJBs to contain specific information so that programmers below their level would not have to worry about connectivity issues or about the architecture. Using EJBs, business-level programmers need only know which object they need to talk to in order, to get the information they want.

A big factor in the decision to use EJBs was the team's desire to save programming time and effort by building reusable objects. “When you have only one project, you don't expect to reuse a lot. When we leveraged and built the Order-Management and Inventory-Management systems, we started reusing objects and began to get a web-like effect in which different objects rely on other objects. We are now starting to realize the economy of scale of reusability. It is a curve. In the beginning, you build the objects for the first time, knowing that you will reuse them. It is not until you have multiple applications that you can take advantage of it,” says Mowen.

Right now, about a third of the objects are reused. The team designed about two-thirds of the objects to be reusable. About one-third of the servlets and EJBs are support-type code that is not reusable by nature.

9.3.5. Architecture

Developing the architecture behind HomeDirectUSA required thinking on several levels, including accomodating legacy code, identifying useful interfaces between applications, and selecting projects well-suited to the EJB component model.

Back-End Applications

HomeDirectUSA relies on legacy code that is about 10 to 15 years old to support its business, which has changed dramatically in the past 10 years. The code is still fundamentally solid and sound and can scale to support large numbers of users. “It's very stable, so there's no good reason to get rid of it,” said Mowen.

IMS transactions, the underlying foundation for all the applications, run in the OTMA (Open Transaction Manager Access) region of the IMS system. IMS transactions are available and can run in parallel with their Web-based systems. HomeDirectUSA did not want to turn off the older system and go live with a new one right away. The company wanted to roll out the new application while mitigating its risk through its ability to revert back to the old system. Going forward, the team anticipates adding quite a bit of new functionality for the Web-based application.

Currently, HomeDirectUSA simply leverages IMS transactions and/or DB2 subroutines and stored procedures. “It's more efficient for us to do that, since they are all mainframe applications. We felt it was more stable than managing everything in WebSphere, with EJBs that had stateful sessions,” says Randy Mowen. Basically, everything that is delivered to the EJB is stateless. In other words, the data is useful as a snapshot. If you need to update the information, you need to rerun the transaction to get the new data. “To us, that was the most stable option and as efficient in terms of performance, which is another thing we wanted to ensure,” he notes.

Applications that Interface

All new applications will be driven by DB2 database. However, the company still relies on data stores and transactions that store IMS data. Moving forward, the team anticipates more inventory-centric needs, more-detailed or granular-level visibility into inventory turnaround, and aggressive types of inventory management functions. “As we build these applications, there will be more interfacing to a more robust, centrally managed inventory system. That's going to involve program changes that that will probably make extensive use of stored procedures. Much of this effort will focus on calling the stored procedures from EJBs and servlets to present information on the Web,” says Mowen.

Thinking Behind the Application

There were certain types of information for which the team felt the EJB concept was especially suited. For example, customer profile and customer inventory information sit well in an EJB format. Defining that kind of data as EJBs made more sense than doing it at the servlet level because with EJBs, you can make more-complex relationships easier to understand.

“Everyone can understand the concept of customer inventory. We have defined it to have certain attributes, such as a make and model number. If the items have a serial number, there is a description, location, and other attributes associated with it. We can use those objects, or EJBs, and know that is where we will retrieve the information, and that it will be a repository for that type of information consistently. Other applications that rely on customer inventory know they have to talk to that bean to get that type of information,” notes Mowen.

9.3.6. Projects

HomeDirectUSA completed three applications to streamline its business and take it into the twenty-first century. Its Shipping and Tracking application (STS) is a Web-based application that allows agents and customers to track shipments. Customers can place orders across the Web with the Order-Management application, and the Inventory-Management solution allows customers to view warehouse inventory and place orders directly.

A servlet-based application, STS allows customers to perform shipment tracking. The two latest projects address more-fundamental business applications. The Order Management application is the company's central application that allows customers to place orders. It is an efficient way for customers to tell HomeDirectUSA how to move their inventory or freight through the system, and is the focal point and centerpiece of all the applications.

From there, the development team built the Inventory-Management application, which allows customers to place orders with full visibility of all inventory in the HomeDirectUSA system.

9.3.7. Shipment Tracking

The Shipment-Tracking application provides more visibility of shipments that have already been ordered and displays the status of the orders. Now the application is expanded to allow customers looking for specific pieces of furniture to search the company's inventory and to attach available pieces of inventory to an order (see Figure 9.4).

The STS application was completely new to HomeDirectUSA. The Order-Management and Inventory-Management projects were basically rewrites of COBOL applications into the Java language using EJBs. These two projects involved more legacy conversion than writing a new application.

STS is designed to be a robust, flexible, and easily maintained system, based on multitier architecture. Each architectural layer has clearly defined responsibilities, with minimal dependencies between layers. The team took the time to look at the overall architecture in order to create a more robust solution. By taking this approach, it created a nice end-to-end solution that is neatly integrated with back-end legacy systems (see Figure 9.5).

Each component is implemented with minimum development dependencies. As a result, modifications or improvements at the component level can be made easily, without affecting the rest of the system. The cost of each change is proportional to the size of the change, not to the size of the system.

The presentation tier is built independently of the database and contains no complex business logic. Developers without business programming knowledge can create completely new views or modify existing views independent of the business-object layer. With the help of VisualAge for Java's drag-and-drop view construction, even nonprogrammers can build new views. Using VisualAge for Java, the team can change the user interface quickly. There is no need to change, redeploy, or retest server components when view changes are made. In fact, the team estimates a 25 to 50 percent reduction in the time it takes to create new views.

A mapping layer between legacy data types of column names enables the existing mainframe tables to change, without affecting every e-business user. Only the mapping layer need be updated.

The result is that business programmers are shielded from database knowledge. Currently, HomeDirectUSA has WebSphere Application Server accessing a DB2 database, both residing on Windows NT Server. In the future, the team plans to optimize persistence behavior and possibly migrate distributed databases over to the IBM S/390 MVS mainframe. And it will all be transparent to the business programmer.

Through STS, customers can access accurate, timely information about shipments using any standard Web browser. Every time an item moves within a warehouse, onto a truck, or is delivered, its item-level bar code is scanned and the information is available immediately via the Internet.

STS revolutionized the way HomeDirectUSA defines customer service by launching the company into e-business with a high-performance, scalable, multitier infrastructure. The company is now positioned to provide additional functionality quickly to its Web-based application.

Order Management

It came down to two options when considering which route to take with the Order-Management architecture. Either design a simple servlet-driven application like STS, or use more robust EJBs. The team chose EJBs, which make up the core of the base logic. Some servlets also support the application.

“We knew we wanted to use VisualAge, WebSphere, and Java architecture because of the success we had and also because of the scalability factors. Our hardware architecture was built to spec to support it, and we already had the skill sets from the administrative and coding sides. We didn't look at any other languages or at any other base-level tools. We use mostly WebSphere Studio,” says Mowen.

The company wanted to have an application that would allow accessibility to the system from anywhere. The Order-Management application is designed to allow anyone, anywhere, with Internet access, to enter an order or place an order into the system. That was the main motivating factor.

Methodology for Order Management. The methodology for this project was a little different than it would be for a new application because it was a legacy application being rewritten in the Java language. The business logic had already been designed, and the team just had to “Webify” COBOL transactions running as IMS transactions or COBOL subroutines. The team had faith in the COBOL business logic and believed it was rock solid.

The Order-Management project was a matter of pairing a Java language programmer with a COBOL programmer to establish which program should be leveraged, or called, by the EJB to enable the business logic. In essence, it was a matter of mapping out which EJB would call which COBOL program. Once the developers knew the layout, they cut and pasted the specific COBOL code into the VisualAge for Java code generator to create the appropriate Java code for talking to the application.

This was the first time the team used the generator, which creates Java language code and classes that developers can look at. “Some parts are encrypted, but the majority of code is visible, including the parameters and the I/O. We could look at it and make sure it was correct. As we worked through the task, the tool worked the way we thought it would, and made the appropriate calls to the appropriate subroutines or transactions,” explains Mowen. “I don't know how we could have done this project without the reverse generator in VisualAge for Java. We wouldn't have known or had the expertise to even approach it. We could not have made calls to the existing program and would have had to rewrite it entirely in the Java language. It would have easily taken five times longer to code the enterprise beans and required the cost of an additional programmer, doubling expenses for the project,” he continues.

The Old System. The order process in place before the team started the project was a series of 3270 screens based on IMS transactions. The screens varied, depending on the type of order entered and on criteria entered to define how to process the order. The system was not intuitive. It was designed for someone who knew the business, understood the Bekins order process, and knew the codes and acronyms necessary to place an order.

HomeDirectUSA wanted to simplify the process so that someone with no knowledge of Bekins' order policies could place an order correctly. The new application was designed to make things easier and more intuitive. The application went further and validated up-front that information was in the acceptable range of entry, whether or not it was correct.

Keep It Simple. “The first order of business was to keep it simple. We supported everything on a Windows NT platform and replicated the data that used to be supported for the shipment-tracking application. From that point, we wrote SQL statements against it to provide shipment visibility. We kept most of the moving pieces simple and concentrated on writing and supporting the code,” says Mowen.

Once the team had the application working, they moved into their true workhorse environment—the mainframe. Since the team was already replicating shipment-tracking data from the mainframe systems, they decided to move all the STS data residing on a DB2 database running on Windows NT platform back to the OS/390. “We made a conscious effort to build all the connectivity features and functions onto the mainframe to allow Java applications to speak to the mainframe. We looked at the IMS TOC connector from IBM to allow us to connect to IMS transactions. And installed DB2 Connect so that we could easily make calls to DB2 OS/390 data from Java applications,” explains Mowen. “Now that we have all the architecture set up, and WebSphere configured and connected to the system, it is very easy to plug in new applications and go after that data because the architecture doesn't really change.”

Inventory Management

The discussions on the inventory visibility project began in February 2000, as it was driven by the Order-Management project. The Inventory-Management application was a natural extension of Order-Management capabilities.

A screen on the Order-Management application acts as a door into the Inventory-Management system. A screen in the Order-Management application asks for line items or inventory. Clicking on a button takes you to an inventory screen that asks for an SKU or model number, to view the entire inventory in a specific region, warehouse, or nationwide. Clicking on an item populates the order. HomeDirectUSA actually provides inventory information back to the customer.

The Order-Management solution is an IMS-based system that is completely transaction-based. Inventory is managed in a DB2 database running on the S/390 platform. The inventory-management application is all stored-procedure driven. All the logic is written in DB2 COBOL stored procedures and the EJB simply calls stored procedures.

The stored procedures retrieve a certain number of rows of data based on the parameters entered into the query. For example, you may have make, model, and agent location; or make, model, and region; or all makes and models across the inventory in the Bekins system nationwide. The application displays as inventory by region and by location. It also provides serial number and date, so orders can be removed in a Last-In, First-Out (LIFO) or First-In, First-Out (FIFO) inventory-management structure. However customers choose to complete an order, Bekins gives them the information. Then it's as easy as clicking items to fill in the order form.

“We have real-time inventory positions managed by EXE Technology's Exceed Management System which are run by each of our warehouses. The application runs locally at each agent facility, so they can keep up to date on our inventory positions. These, in turn, feed the central DB2 database,” Mowen goes on to say. “We use MQSeries as the interface between all those warehouse management databases and DB2 databases. It's the message interface we use to replicate the data up to that DB2 repository.” The Inventory-Management application complements the other two applications by providing more depth and greater inventory visibility to clients.

9.3.8. Development Team

The development team included a lead developer, a system architect, an object modeler, and a database administrator for the Shipment-Tracking project. “An outside resource helped us with the initial architecture and got us started with the Java language code. Basically, it was a five-person team,” says Mowen.

For the Order-Management application, the team started with three internal Java programmers and two outside resources who strictly wrote Java language code. Randy Mowen designed the architecture. The systems programmer on the OS/390 side helped set up the IMS TCP/IP OTMA Connector, the IMS sessions, and the DB2 Connect environment. Two junior programmers worked on inventory movability.

9.3.9. Computing Environment

The workhorse is Big Iron, an OS/390 system supported by the IBM Center in Dallas (see Figure 9.6).Bekins connects to Big Iron through TCP and SNA. The SNA connectivity supports all the 3270 users. TCP/IP supports all the Web activity and DB2 Connect. Internally, Bekins has a regular Ethernet network setup. The WebSphere environment has two Compaq servers running Windows NT supporting it. Two HTTP servers support the HTML code, which acts as a portal to the Web. A DB2 Connect machine allows Java applications and users to connect to DB2 data. It is also a gateway for an IMS TCP/IP OTMA Connector so that Java applications can talk to IMS transactions.

Bekins has SQL Server warehouse-management databases that connect via MQSeries send-and-receive channels to the central DB2 database running on OS/390. Agents connect through frame relays and TCP/IP into the company's virtual private network.

9.3.10. Lessons Learned

“From an efficiency point of view, we became more conscious of documenting, following procedures, and understanding where our code lives. Under the old paradigm, if you wanted a change you had to do one of two things. You could either complete an impact analysis and make changes to the existing code if possible. Alternatively, you made a carbon copy, copied that code, and did it again. Often, you missed a business rule or something else that was key, resulting in problems. With more than 2,000 COBOL programs on the mainframe, there is redundant code and the potential for missing a business rule. Because we have copied, copied, and copied again to support a new function, reusability guarantees that you use the same rule every time. That is huge for us,” notes Mowen.

On the development side, the team learned to leverage the power of the Enterprise Edition of VisualAge for Java. Even without prior training or experience with the toolset, developers were able to produce a complex, dynamic application in just three months. The application has a rich feature set. The centralized repository, for example, was a big benefit for the team, allowing developers to share written code and save valuable time. With VisualAge for Java's servlet-builder tool, the team was able to generate servlets quickly, without having to hand-write code to generate HTML pages.

HomeDirectUSA realized order-of-magnitude productivity gains, and coding is at least 75 percent faster compared with alternate tools and methods.

9.3.11. Maintenance and Performance

The new applications have been extremely stable, and the team has not had any problems. They have one WebSphere administrator and one network administrator. Most important, the new applications have not increased demand for more administration.

The team members reached their goal of sub-second performance for STS. The other two applications have seen similar performance to the old 3270 application, which was the goal. “In certain cases, there is a lot more information than we anticipated but we still remain within the performance range that we strive for,” says Mowen.

9.3.12. Outcome

This redirection of its order processing system is a major step in the right direction for HomeDirectUSA, both from a customer-service perspective and from a technological perspective. The company is putting up barriers, and the competition is starting to lose ground.

“In our environment, we know who the major players and the major customers are,” says Mowen. “Retaining our own customers and even attracting some that are with our competitors are both important. Self-service applications, in our experience, increase customer response times and increase satisfaction tremendously. So the more we can offer self-service applications on the Web, the higher our retention rate. And we feel that we'll be able to obtain a market share.”

Building applications based on J2EE technology was a big step for HomeDirectUSA. “Some virtual type of logistics companies have the technology, but they don't have the infrastructure and are not brick-and-mortar companies at all. The key is that a traditional company that actually delivers the services is bolting on this technology. We really have an end-to-end solution from logistics to delivery,” Mowen continues.

The Shipment-Tracking application has resulted in total financial benefits of more than $10 million (U.S.) in increased revenue projected annually, and Bekins won a number of important new accounts due to its ability to deliver online STS functionality. Information is provided electronically over the Web, reducing operating expenses $250,000 annually.

Improved customer service and satisfaction resulted from faster access to information. In the past, it could take hours for customers to get answers, via telephone or fax, to their questions on shipping status. With STS, both the direct customers and their end consumers can access shipping reports instantly across the Web. They have full supply-chain visibility and can track an order to the exact moment of delivery. Consequently, retailers can bill the consumer faster, improving their cash flow position. At the same time, STS frees HomeDirect customer-service representatives to focus on handling exceptions. All this results in high overall customer satisfaction.

An important benefit in planning for future growth of the e-business service channel, the Java technology-based system encompasses multiple operating systems. It currently uses both IBM S/390 MVS and Windows NT.

9.3.13. Future Direction

In the future, the development team sees information flowing much more dynamically and more seamlessly through their applications. They foresee that the need for more front-end applications will probably diminish, with enterprise application integration, data transformation, and response to other people's demand for open systems increasing.

The Shipment-Tracking application was customer-driven. A large dot-com customer demanded that its customers have order-tracking visibility. “From there, we expanded to include assessing customer complaints, customer requests, and internal demands for increased turnover of revenue. It gave every aspect of our business a benefit. Now we will probably focus more on different target groups. We'll extend this to whichever markets and niches offer benefit. These two applications were fundamental,” explains Mowen.

For more information about the IBM Websphere application server, visit http://www.ibm.com/websphere. For the HomeDirect Web site, visit http://www.homedirectusa.com. For more information about Honeywell, visit http://www.honeywell.com.