JK Enterprises HATS/Portal Demo
This demonstration is
intended to showcase the potential value of an integrated solution that
includes IBM’s WebSphere Portal and Host Access Transformation Services
(HATS). While this example uses a manufacturing
sector scenario, most of the concepts and functions would be relevant to all
industries.
Here we have JK
Enterprises, a manufacturer of toys and sporting goods for small children, working
hard to sell their products to end customers through distributors. Like most firms, JK Enterprises operates with
both a direct sales force (selling to large customer opportunities) and a
distributor team (that in turn sells to consumers and small business). Over time they have implemented a national Inside
Sales team to offload their highly paid direct sales reps (from both direct
sales and distributor operations) of re-orders and other administrative
concerns.
JK Enterprises has a member
within the Inside Sales team for each of its geographic regions: Northeast;
Southeast; Central; and West territories.
Each region also has its own warehouse where inventory is kept to expedite
orders to their distributors when necessary.
Distributors for JK
Enterprises can submit their orders in a number of different ways: they can
send an e-mail with the part numbers they are ordering; they can fax in their
order; they can mail in their order; or they can call their inside sales
representative for their region and place their order over the telephone.
JK Enterprises has
implemented a phased approach to their Enterprise Portal framework, using IBM
WebSphere Portal and Host Access Transformation Services. JK Enterprises is currently in its first
phase of their portal implementation.
The current phase now allows their sales team to access and interact
with legacy inventory tracking applications, product information, and customer
data all within a personalized, single point-of-entry. The second phase will include an extranet
portal environment that will allow their distributors to place orders directly
to JK Enterprises.
Here we find Peter Miller,
an inside sales representative for the Northeast logging into his portal.
Peter navigates to his “My
Office” tab to view his e-mail. Some
distributors in his Northeast region prefer to place their orders in this
manner.
There is an e-mail sent by Lisa
Blalock at NC Toys.
Peter opens up Lisa’s
e-mail (left mouse click on the upside down triangle next to e-mail and choose
“Open”).
Lisa wants to place an
order for 3 different products: stuffed koala, stuffed dachshund and toy panda.
Peter closes the e-mail popup window
and begins to process Lisa’s order.
Peter first wants to
confirm that the items and quantities requested are in stock at their regional
warehouse. In the past, Peter would need
to access several 5250 screens and input the same data on many of those screens
to confirm those items are available. Today,
with WebSphere Portal, Peter can access all their iSeries applications directly
from JK Enterprises’ portal.
Peter first needs to
specify a part category. Within the
“Parts Category” portlet, Peter left mouse clicks on the drop down menu box.
From the choices available
within the drop-down menu, he chooses “Animals”, then “Get Products”.
(For the purposes of the
demonstration, make the assumption that Peter has already checked that the
first two items are in stock and is now about to check on the third item, the
toy panda)
To obtain details about the
panda, Peter can either manually enter the part number in the “PartsDetail”
portlet or he can take advantage of the portal’s inter-portlet communication and
“click-to-action” capabilities.
The portal server provides a mechanism for portlets
to communicate with one another, exchanging data or other messages. Portlet
communication can be used to copy common data between portlets. This saves
redundant typing by the user and makes the portal easier to use. The term "Click-to-Action" is used
for the pop-up menu that allows the user to direct the information to a target
portlet or set of portlets. The
objective of the click-to-action portlets is to increase the productivity of portal
users working with multiple portlets by easily enabling them to send information
from one portlet to another.
Peter clicks on the icon, to the left of part number
11 with the left mouse button. This
activates the “click-to-action” popup menu.
His choices allow him to transfer the data to the “Parts Detail”
portlet, the “PartsPicture” portlet or to all portlets on the page. He chooses the latter by clicking that choice
with the left mouse button. That action automatically sends the part
information to the other two portlets. The
“Parts Detail” portlet is a 5250 application and the “Parts Picture” portlet is
a picture database.
Peter sees from the “PartsDetail” portlet that their
regional warehouse does not have enough quantity on hand to fulfill Lisa’s
order. “That’s too bad”, Peter thinks for he knows Lisa needs these items as
soon as possible.
Peter is about to place this
item on backorder, when he notices that Bob Billman, Warehouse manager, has an
online status next to his name in the “Who is Here” portlet.
Many functions for dynamic
communication are embedded within the fabric of the portal, such as online
awareness. Awareness is the ability to tell who a person is and whether they
are online, offline, or not available. Awareness can be added anyplace there is
a name. This contextual collaboration provides
“supercharged” instant messaging and dynamic information capability.
Peter sends Bob an instant
message to inquire whether or not a shipment has arrived from the factory that
may contain enough toy pandas to complete Lisa’s order. Fortunately, as we see from the instant
message, there are indeed enough pandas in this morning’s shipment to fulfill
the order.
Because of this real-time
collaboration, Peter can now process the order, instead of placing Lisa’s request
on backorder.
Now that Peter has processed
customer orders that were generated overnight, he is ready to continue his
daily activities.
Peter observes that his alert
viewer contains a notice pertaining to one of their children’s toys that they
distribute. He will review the notice in
a moment.
Meanwhile, when Peter was reviewing
the contents of his e-mail earlier, Peter noticed an item sent by his regional manager
Ed Ungemach. Ed has requested that
Peter review the monthly sales report for his territory.
Each month, the regional
manager sends the previous month’s sales figures to each of the territory reps
for their perusal and commentaries.
Ed did not send an e-mail
with an attachment, but instead refers Peter to their company’s centralized
document repository, the Portal Document Manager. PDM empowers the territory reps with the
capability of viewing, modifying, and managing their documents and
information. This is a far more efficient and scalable
means of sharing documents than by continually attaching a team document to an
e-mail.
Peter clicks on the
“Documents” tab and notices several categories within the Portal Document
Manager. Since he is a territory sales
rep, he then clicks on his department’s (“Sales Dept”) tab to review the
monthly sales report.
Peter clicks on “Territory
Reports”. He now has several choices: he
can view the “Dec 2004 Territory Report” spreadsheet or he can edit that same
document. Peter
chooses to edit the December 2004 sales spreadsheet because he needs to add both
his comments and his initials to it.
Peter clicks on the edit
button ( ) to open up the December
2004 Territory spreadsheet in edit mode.
This spreadsheet was originally
created by Ed using Microsoft® Excel. Ed
then stored the spreadsheet within the Document Manager for all territory reps
to access. Text editing and spreadsheet
functions are critical to many business processes. However, these functions are not integrated
with other systems and are expensive to maintain with existing solutions.
Although Peter doesn’t have
the Microsoft® Excel application on his desktop, he may still work with the
spreadsheet using the WebSphere Portal Productivity Components. Provided with WebSphere Portal, WebSphere
Portal Productivity Components allow users to view, create, convert and edit
basic documents, spreadsheets and presentation files from the same portal interface.
The December 2004 Territory
spreadsheet contains both the forecasted and the actual sales figures per
territory for the month of December. Ed requires
all his territory reps to initial the spreadsheet to confirm their
perusal. In addition, he asks them to
make pertinent comments, such as reasons why actual sales exceeded or didn’t
achieve their projected monthly sales figures.
For demonstration sake, we
have already appended Peter’s comments to the spreadsheet. Notice that we are adding Peter’s initials
using a spreadsheet macro.
Now that Peter has completed
his review of the previous month’s sales, he recalls a product notice is listed
in his alert viewer. He is now ready to
navigate through the folder hierarchy to “Product Notices”. Because a “bread crumb trail” is always
visible, Peter always knows where he is in the document management structure
and can quickly reach the documents he needs.
Peter clicks on “Sales
Dept” within the “navigation” or “bread crumb” trail. This trail is a way for the user to know where
he or she is within the hierarchical folder structure and can easily retrace his
or her steps.
“Navigation” or “Bread
Crumb” Trail
Since Peter only needs to
view the document, he clicks on “Make-Up Mirror Notice”. You will see a pop-up window that contains
the notice. Increase the window size to
better read the document.
(Increase
the size of the pop-up window by moving the mouse to the bottom right hand side
of the window. When you see the double
arrows appear, click on the left mouse button and while the left mouse button
is still depressed, move mouse to the right until the window is large enough)
This document was created
using the productivity components integrated within the portal. Peter notes that the warning notice has
changed to now safely recommend this product to 3 and 4 year old children,
which increases their market segment for the Make-Up Mirror set.
Because WebSphere Portal
has helped Peter to prioritize and execute on his tasks in an efficient manner,
he handled his most urgent tasks quickly and completely. Now Peter can move on to his regular e-mail
for lower priority tasks or for other longer running projects he’s working on.
This concludes the
WebSphere Portal HATS/Click-to-Action demo.
See the next few pages for
a summary of the key WebSphere Portal benefits shown in this demo.
JK Enterprises HATS/Portal Demo
IBM WebSphere® Portal Benefits
· Application
Integration
o
Connect to virtually any application in your enterprise.
· Integration at
the glass
o
Combine disparate applications into meaningful work functions.
· Collaboration
o
Permit real-time, person-to-person communications for more
efficient work environments.
o
Share documents across the enterprise with security and
access control.
IBM WebSphere®
Portal
– A
single workplace for everything you do.
JK Enterprises HATS/Portal Demo
Host Access Transformation Services
Benefits
· Transforms 3270 and
5250 screens into HTML dynamically
· Migrates host
applications in a very short timeframe (in hours) without recoding applications
· Integrates with IBM
WebSphere® Portal, IBM WebSphere® Application Server and IBM WebSphere® Studio.
IBM WebSphere® Host Access Transformation Services (HATS)
- Quickly and easily extend your legacy
applications
JK Enterprises HATS/Portal Demo
Behind the Scenes
(What’s in the Demo?)
WebSphere
Portal
People Awareness
Portal Document manager
Click-to-Action
Productivity Components
Host
Access Transformation Services (HATS)
Click-to-Action
Rules-based data stream transformation
engine