Case Study: Konica Business Technologies

Konica Business Technologies XML-enables legacy service dispatch application with HostBridge.
HostBridge simplified integration of CICS data with WebSphere e-business application.

Konica Business Technologies has 600 field service technicians and service managers in 50 branch offices nationwide. SIMS is the service and dispatch application on which the field service organization relies. “SIMS is our largest and most critical application,” states Brian Spears, director of information technology at Konica Business Technologies. “It’s a homegrown, CICS application that has been around for about 12 years. It does everything we want, and we have yet to find a replacement solution that would work better. We have no plans to phase it out.”

Konica has implemented HostBridge™ to link its Service Information Management System (SIMS), a CICS-based service and dispatch application, with its comprehensive e-business environment known as KoniNet. KoniNet is a collection of Java servlets created using, and running under, WebSphere. HostBridge causes the SIMS CICS transactions to output XML documents instead of 3270 screens, providing a simple, standards-based integration path to KoniNet that did not necessitate changing SIMS.

Challenge

The field service organization remotely accessed SIMS using two-way pagers, interfaced to a Voice Response Unit (VRU) front-end for taking calls, ordering parts, logging time on site, and closing calls. “A lot of time was spent passing data back and forth, but the typical pager or WAP interface was less than ideal for this,” continues Spears.

This cumbersome method of remote access to SIMS became the focus of an effort to streamline critical business processes. Because of the digital nature of Konica Business Technologies’ product lines, and because many of them are network-connected devices, the field service technicians carried laptop PCs to perform diagnostics. The logical choice was to provide enhanced access to SIMS by linking it into KoniNet, which already provides security, access rights and profiles needed by other users for access to other back-office information from Oracle and mainframe databases.

Technical Requirements

Spears wanted to do more than just web-enable the SIMS application. “Webifying CICS screens usually implied a separate interface, logon, and some way of looking at a 3270 screen on the browser – all of which we wanted to avoid. We already had a single sign-on environment in KoniNet. I didn’t want to add another for SIMS, or a different interface for a cluttered CICS screen crammed with data.” Other implications existed for adapting SIMS for use by a different kind of user, field service technicians instead of dispatch agents in a call center. Spears concluded that this project was more about integrating SIMS data with KoniNet than just representing SIMS screens through the KoniNet interface.

Solution

Spears investigated his options, which included web-to-host products that allowed the SIMS interface to be manipulated, but he found they did not interface seamlessly with KoniNet. Then Konica Business Technologies learned about HostBridge. “We wanted to keep it simple,” Spears continues. “We were doing a lot with XML work internal to the KoniNet application, so we were comfortable with it. We started working with HostBridge and pushed the envelope to get it working the way we wanted. We were willing to invest the time to do this because we liked the HostBridge methodology.”

HostBridge now integrates SIMS with KoniNet. Field service technicians will have access to KoniNet through an ISP using their laptop PCs. Their interaction with KoniNet will cause KoniNet to request SIMS data through HostBridge via an HTTP request. HostBridge directs the execution of the SIMS CICS transactions; it then creates XML documents as output from them, instead of 3270 screens. The XML integrates easily with WebSphere and KoniNet’s suite of Java servlets. The resulting integration is very scalable since it does not rely on brittle screen-scraping techniques. The figure below shows the KoniNet architecture.

Figure 1. KoniNet architecture

Benefits

HostBridge will lower operational costs and boost field service technician productivity. “We did reduce costs by getting rid of pagers,” concludes Spears. “This savings was offset by ISP costs, but there is still a savings. The bigger area of savings will be productivity. Using pagers to go through a VRU, which in turn interacts with SIMS, is a difficult way to enter alphanumeric part numbers, which the technicians do often. If they entered a typo, the technicians would get a page-back to fix it. And with pagers, they don’t have all the information to which they would like to have access. HostBridge simplifies entering data, validating data, and providing access to more information. Without HostBridge, we would have had to delve deeper into screen scraping applications, which have their idiosyncrasies.”