Uniface Delivers Great Service for Major ERP Software Developer

Web services and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) are terms that have been bandied around for a while, but it is rare to find a large-scale software system that has been engineered to use them from day one. Systems house Datakor has been able to do exactly that by choosing Compuware Uniface for the mission-critical development of its new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system.

Established in 1970 and now a part of the major Belgian software group CCS, Datakor is a systems house specializing in ERP solutions that are based on pre-built modules but configured to suit individual customers’ needs. Its ERP product, SYNCHRO, has more than 750 installations, in Belgium, France and The Netherlands. The typical customer is a medium to large enterprise in the construction, metal, distribution, food or chemicals sector, although other industries are also represented. Datakor has 32 employees and annual revenue of 3,200,000 euros. The CCS group has 93 employees and annual revenue of 9,000,000 euros.

Datakor has chosen Compuware Uniface as the environment for a major rewrite of its popular ERP product SYNCHRO, released in 2004. The development has adopted a service-based approach, organizing the new software not around arbitrarily segmented chunks of code but around services—each service involving the provision of a logically distinct piece of processing or information. A service can be made available as widely as the owner chooses. Uniface’s Web services functionality enables Datakor’s SOA approach.

Datakor’s application architect, Hans Vynckier, explains the value of this approach: "Previously, when we needed to add flexibility and functionality to our package, it meant writing more code, which resulted in a less maintainable product. Now, we can achieve flexibility by adding interfaces between services and forms; we can increase functionality by creating new services or extending existing ones."

Around 2002, Datakor decided to take advantage of the slowdown in the global software market to create a brand-new ERP product that will satisfy the 21st century needs of its customers. It had several major improvements in view, one of the most important being integral web support. This development is a major undertaking by any standard. The design includes 500 forms, 1,100 services and 500 entities.

Choosing Uniface

Datakor evaluated several leading development tool sets before opting for Uniface as the best environment in which to develop its new ERP system. "Uniface was the product that suited our management goals best overall," says Vynckier. "One of our most important goals was to obtain an integrated development environment for both client/server and web applications. We realized that with Uniface—and particularly with its support for Web services—we would be able to achieve this goal."

Uniface was the product that suited our management goals best overall. —Hans Vynckier, Application Architect, Datakor

Adoption of SOA is an essential aspect of Datakor’s use of Uniface. SOA results in the logical grouping of components to provide business services. Rather than a program calling a subroutine, say, services communicate with other services through requests for processing or information, and through responses to such requests.

"We didn’t make a conscious decision to go in the direction of SOA," says Vynckier. "It was a natural consequence of what we wanted to do."

Because the logic of a given piece of processing is coded within a self-contained unit, rather than being spread across a number of units and the interfaces between them, the result is tidier and easier to maintain. That’s an important benefit of SOA for Datakor. "To us, SOA is not a standard or a technique," says Vynckier, "it’s quickly become a way of life. And it’s a way of life to which Uniface is well-suited."

Web Services: Many Problems, One Solution

Since the advent of the web a decade ago, businesses have been using the Internet to get closer to their stakeholders—shareholders, employees, customers and partners. The Internet has been used to automate supply chains and improve business process efficiency. Electronic business is no longer a future direction—it has become the norm. Web services offer businesses the opportunity to design, develop and build a new generation of applications based around Internet standards and protocols. These open web standards make it far easier to integrate applications across disparate hardware and software platforms, both internally and externally—a constant issue with existing technology and often a barrier to communicating with partners and customers.

Datakor is making extensive use of Uniface’s support for Web services. The logic to support Web services is contained within the templates which were created at the start of the project as part of Datakor’s Best Practices Development Framework (please see Datakor Gets Down to Business with Uniface). Vynckier says, "It took us about a month to set up a really good Web services environment, including all necessary security measures from scratch, using the facilities within Uniface. Now in return for that initial effort it’s very easy to add new Web services to our application—I’ve found I can create three new services in one day, and that is likely to get faster as we go along."

Web services are providing all of the product’s web-related functionality. Not only conventional PCs but also PDAs, and indeed any device with a radio frequency interface, will be able to access the system, populating "data islands" within HTML pages with information drawn from within the system. "Any device that’s not directly connected to our system can be given access through ‘provision’ Web services," sums up Vynckier.

Web Services and the Supply Chain

The use of Web services also solves many integration problems, without the need to write special interfaces. Vynckier says, "We’re delighted that the latest Uniface release, version 8.4, provides enhanced support for ‘consumption’—the ability to use other organizations’ exposed Web services. We feel it’s even more commercially important to our customers than the reverse procedure, ‘provision’, where they provide services for others. So, for example, our product already has the ability to use Web services to obtain price and stock information from external systems. That capability has been integrated invisibly into the system, so that users don’t even have to press a button to pull the data in; it just looks like part of their own application."

Customers needing to achieve supply chain integration should therefore welcome the advent of Web services. Another important context for Web services is the increasing use of data alignment services, where shared data, particularly data of regulatory importance, is held on centralized databases. For example, several European governments already are creating data alignment services with respect to drug information. Instead of each company in the industry needing to replicate the information in its own database—which is wasteful and introduces the risk of using out-of-date data—businesses will all be able to use Web services to access the information in a data alignment service when they need it.

Streamlining Integration and Migration

Datakor’s comprehensive ERP functionality means that most companies do not need to implement other business systems, and so can side-step some of the biggest enterprise application integration pitfalls. Nonetheless, companies often have small, specialized applications, such as production control systems, that must be integrated with their ERP processes. Uniface makes it easy to exchange data with such systems in XML format, so that no special interfaces need to be written by Datakor: It’s simply a matter of configuring the in-house systems to produce data in the correct format. Interestingly, Datakor has added an XML interface to its earlier product, so that customers will enjoy a more straightforward migration from the old system to the new.

The XML-based approach, together with Web services, will make it very easy for customers to migrate progressively from the old system to the new one. This will avoid the risk and disruption of migrating the whole application at once, and will also allow customers to take advantage of elements of Datakor’s new package as and when they become available. Vynckier explains, "They will be able to use Web services to import a relatively small amount of data at a time, and so keep the old and new systems synchronized without the overhead of having to import all their data repeatedly during the transitional period."

A Ready-made Solution

Datakor’s general manager, Antoon de Meester, says, "For ERP users to be able to participate in the new global economy, computer systems all over the world must work together effectively. Uniface’s support for Web services, together with other techniques such as XML messaging, is providing us with a ready-made solution to the problem of integration of information and data."