Case Studies
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Case Studies
Enkitec Develops Custom Shipping Application in APEX
Business Problem
A large franchisor of shipping services with franchisee offices across the United States and a billing center in Houston, TX. The Franchisor, along with their franchisees, each were using a system called PICKS to manage their shipping business. Multiple copies of the application were running across multiple locations, thus multiple versions of the application were in use. This architecture was inherently error prone and difficult to ensure that application changes reach each location in the same time frame.
While the PICKS application supports The Franchisor/Franchisee's internal functions, their web site provided a modern interface for Franchisor's customers (the web site is where they schedule shipments). The franchisor wanted a web-based application that would extend the architecture used by their current website, thereby removing many of the interfaces between billing and each franchisee, as well as eliminating the costly process upgrading each franchisee's PICK application. Initially, only the Pricing module from PICKS was migrated, but over time all remaining modules were moved over to the newer technology architecture. Centralizing the franchisor's applications ensured that all remote offices would operate using the same software stack improving overall efficiency, accuracy and stability.
Solution
To re-platform the PICKS pricing module in the new web-based system , the Pricing screens were built as web-enabled objects. Since equivalent Customer and Pricing tables exist in both the PICKS and Web-Site databases, the new screens can be easily modeled and implemented on the centralized server(s). The Pricing screens themselves were based on a design provided by franchisor. Now that the implementation is complete the franchisee's are required to transfer data between PICKS and the We-Site. Using this strategy, the PICKS application was decommissioned one module at a time.
Methodology
This engagement was broken into Phases initially focusing only on the Pricing module related to UPS. Additional functionality was added at the discretion of the Franchisors project management. Given the short timeframe allotted for this application development, the recommended development tools were: Oracle Application Express (APEX), and Java / JSP. Given the Rapid Application Development capability of Oracle APEX and the fact that there were no additional software cost related to the project.
