Which way to the Web?

Software Magazine, Sept, 1998 by Mathew Schwartz

There are a few lessons you ought to know before choosing Build a new front end for your legacy systems.

It's 7:30 PM, you're wrapping up some paperwork when the CEO bursts through the door. "Look," he says to you, breathless, "we've got to get on the Web! I don't care what you do with our legacy systems, but I'm sick of all these green screens." Victim of IBM's recent television advertising campaign? Another example of CEO "drive-by thinking?" Nope, this mandate comes straight from the board: financials, order entry, resource tracking -- get 'em all on the Web, and do it yesterday.

At times like these, you have two clearly defined decisions to make -- buy a brand new, end-to-end suite or adopt a browser paradigm for existing systems. If buying a new ERP suite, then ideally you want it to be built from the ground up for the Web. If, on the other hand, you're happy with your current systems or can't afford the switching cost, you can adopt a browser paradigm without destroying your existing infrastructure -- and your users will be none the wiser.

The Art of the Buy

When Terry Byers walked in the door at American Floral Services (AFS) Inc. in 1996, she inherited a range of ancient systems, and had to decide quickly whether to swap them out or rebuild them. She also had to find a way to satisfy parent company Chemical Bank's request that she look into something called the "Year 2000 problem." Byers decided to scrap everything and install a new ERP package.

The Oklahoma City-based AFS is a "flowers-by-wire" company that competes with FTD and Teleflora, as well as the retail floral industry in general. It works with 25,000 florist customers and also has a large virtual employee base spread across the country, which needs to quickly access customer statements and profiling information.

Byers took stock of the existing situation. Founded 20 years ago as a mom-and-pop business, AFS was still using an antiquated character-based HP legacy 3000 application, as well as some smaller AS/400 systems like Apex and older accounting software from Great Plains Software and Peachtree Software. There was no network in sight. All in all, not a lot to build upon. "Our legacy application, of course, was not [Y2K-compliant] and making it so would have been expensive and time-consuming," says Byers. On top of that, she didn't want to just have a working 20-year-old legacy application by the time she was done.

Management, having brought her in, didn't need to be sold on the idea. "The company was starving for it. We were absolutely starving," says Byers. "The typical data was in concrete, you had to get programmers to write reports, it was just a ball of spaghetti code."

Byers looked at about 20 ERP packages, primarily from a functional perspective, and quickly zeroed in on packages from Lawson Software and Oracle Corp. Lawson was already Web-enabled, while "Oracle was selling futures but was supposedly very near," says Byers. The ability to operate through a browser was essential for AFS, because of the immense numbers of people to support. Also, when comparing the two, she says she wasn't as comfortable with Oracle's service level. Furthermore, Lawson would warranty its product as being Year 2000-compliant. So after referencing 15 of Lawson's customers in various stages of implementation, "I felt we really knew how it would go," says Byers.

AFS selected Lawson Software, a Minneapolis-based $166 million ERP software provider with an impressive 97% customer retention rate. Currently, AFS has Lawson financial software installed, and they built their own sales force automation tool. For mobile users, "one of the things we found is that Lawson runs so thin we were able to install Lawson on our laptops -- [in-house-users] are not running through a browser," despite the fact that they are able to remotely access 1,000 data tables in an Oracle database, says Byers. The client-side OS is NT, and on the server side it's HP Unix.

Don't let Lawson's size fool you: "They compete in the enterprise applications market with companies like SAP, PeopleSoft, Oracle, and J.D. Edwards. They hold their own among very notable players," says Clare Gillan, an analyst with International Data Corp. in Framingham, Mass. "They've had consistently strong growth for a number of years," she says, particularly in the vertical markets they target-- healthcare and retail.

The latest versions of Lawson's software are all Web-enabled; the company rebuilt all of its applications with object-based architectures and Web compatibility. This functionality squares with Gillan's advice for companies looking at ERP: "If you want an entire electronic commerce solution, look at a tool optimized for the Web." Objects in Lawson's architecture can be assembled for various kinds of front ends, browsers included. In addition, Lawson created a "self-evident front end" that gets kudos from users for its smart GUI.

Running a Restaurant

Financial planning and sales force management have devotees outside the floral industry. Rainforest Cafe Inc. needed an enterprise solution, especially where financials were concerned. The $108 million company, which won the 1997 National Retail Federation's Small Store Retailer of the Year award, started in Minneapolis in 1994, and is still headquartered there. You might have encountered its exotic, jungle-theme restaurants and retail spaces in malls. So far, there are over 20 Rainforest Cafes across the country, including one in Disney's Animal Kingdom, as well as several abroad, with many more to open soon.