• Omnis web solution •
Swiss/Italian ERP vendor outperforms large competitors
with Omnis Studio and smart add-on tool
Cross International
Lugano, Switzerland
www.cross-international.com
The Challenge:
Starting from 2002, the situation of the Italian ERP market changed dramatically when large global vendors like Microsoft and SAP started to sell their products in Italy. This also caused a concentration of Italian ERP companies and many small software houses were acquired.
To remain independent, a small software house today has to compete with much larger enterprises – with far less resources. And, even worse, their ERP system must not only be competitive, but more powerful and attractive than that of the large providers in order to convince customers to choose the product of a smaller manufacturer. This may sound like a hopeless case but Cross International found a solution.
The Solution
For Cross International’s ERP applications Omnis has always been the development tool of choice since 1988. Thanks to its power and advanced Rapid Application Development (RAD) capabilities Omnis Studio is one of the fastest RAD tools in the market, if not the fastest.
However, in the new century the difference in size and resources between Cross International and the large vendors became almost overwhelming. So they had to find a way to increase their development speed even further – and they created CrossModel www.x-cross.cloud/crossmodel.
CrossModel allows the developers to save approx. 90 % of development times or, conversely, increases their resources by a factor of 10. And let’s not forget that CrossModel sits on Omnis Studio, one of the fastest RAD tools, so the efficiency of this combination is much higher than 10 times compared to most other development languages.
ERP in the Internet. The browser interface (thin client) is the best technology for many applications but ERPs are quite special due to the complexity of their data and interface structure.
E. g. in their ERP a sales order is formed of 31 different lists that read and write views in the database, and each one of them has often a very large structure. For example, on order line is formed of 604 columns. For this reason, many software vendors have developed or are developing “smart client” solutions in which the client is a standalone application and not a “guest” in the browser.
Cross International went far beyond the smart client: Thanks to CrossModel, their ERP is a fully featured desktop application that can seamlessly work on a remote CrossCloud server which acts as a “bridge” to the database. This solution is called “Total Client” because it combines the capability to work on the web with the benefits that the users were used to in desktop apps.
Performance. As ERP systems are typically used throughout the day performance is crucial. The Total Client internet technology provides practically the same speed in a LAN and in the web, e.g. a sales order of 50 lines, with the complex data structure described above, can be read in approx. 0.3 seconds.
Customizations. Most ERP implementations require customization to meet individual business needs. However, this is not only associated with high development costs for each individual company, but also with repeated costs for the adoption of these individual customizations in each new version of the standard software.
CrossModel can cut the development time and cost by 90 % and at the same time create customized parts that are fully integrated in the standard software and can be automatically converted to any new version of the standard software including the realignment of the database. This way maintenance costs are cut down completely.
X-Cross
Based on CrossModel Target Cross have been able to develop X-Cross which they believe is the most advanced ERP product in the market with unique features. For more information about this ERP, visit www.x-cross.cloud.
Screenshots
The Company
Cross International is a small software house with a long history of developing ERPs in Omnis. Founded in Italy in 1986 with the name Q-Soft, Cross International have been using Omnis for their development projects since the beginning. In 1988 the first ERP software on Windows, developed in Omnis Quartz, was launched, and since then they continuously enhanced and further developed the application with Omnis.
In 2001 Target Cross, a client-server desktop ERP product written in Omnis Studio, was launched and was very successful in the market. It is sold in Italy by three different distributors (www.target-cross.com) and is used by a wide range of Italian companies.
In 2014, the new ERP X-Cross (www.x-cross.cloud) was launched, once again “raising the bar” for this type of software.
Why Omnis
Cross International has been working on Omnis since 1986, with all the succeeding versions (Omnis 3, Omnis Quartz, Omnis 5, Omnis 7 and Omnis Studio), because this programming language can combine together two qualities that are apparently conflicting:
• Productivity: the capability to produce a high output for unit of time
• Flexibility: the possibility to create the program the way you want it.
“These two qualities are combined together in Omnis like in no other programming language we have tested in 37 years, allowing a small software house to be at the forefront of technology even competing against much larger vendors.
In addition to that, Omnis Studio has the uncommon capability to self-program itself, and this has allowed the development of CrossModel, that further enhances the power of Omnis and it is fully developed with Omnis itself.”
Stefano Querzè
Founder and CEO of Cross International sagl