• Omnis web solution •
Enhancing a legacy COBOL application
with a modern web shop within weeks
The Challenge:
At the heart of EBERHARD’s software infrastructure is a 30-year-old ERP system based on COBOL, which is tailored to the company’s needs and contains thousands of parts and components with all drawings, material specifications and variations. These are high-precision parts for tool and mould making such as nozzle needles, pipette cores, ejectors, cutting punches, guide sleeves etc. with tolerances up to 1 my.
The company needed a modern web shop that could directly access this existing COBOL application and provide detailed descriptions and prices for more than 10,000 items and over 2,000 customers in real time. Other important criteria for the future solution were minimal maintenance, compatibility with all popular browsers, support for load balancing for high availability, and a simple yet modern interface.
The Solution
The ideal solution was realized in the shortest time with Omnis Studio by the company usoft GmbH in Wallerstein, Germany. Within only two weeks, a prototype of the web shop was ready, which was then completely implemented in only six weeks!
The Cobol interface was implemented via ODBC, so that the webshop called GENESIS is directly integrated into the existing legacy system. Thanks to the Omnis JavaScript Client technology, all EBERHARD requirements could be met, which not only led to a high level of acceptance among employees and customers, but also to large time savings for sales.
More than 13,000 items are currently available in the web shop and all customer-specific prices can be displayed directly without any delays. After visualization in the ERP system, orders can be transferred directly into a customer order. Over 35,000 orders have already been processed reliably, quickly and conveniently in this new system – a huge time saving!
Thanks to Omnis Studio, the valuable COBOL application, which has grown over decades, could be supplemented with a modern and user-friendly web shop and thus adapted to the customer’s new requirements – and in just a few weeks!
The Company
EBERHARD WERKZEUGTECHNOLOGIE, founded in 1933, is one of the leading companies in the field of standard and special components for tool, mould and fixture construction. Using the latest technologies and decades of experience, they manufacture customer-specific special parts that meet the highest demands. Today EBERHARD has 380 employees and more than 2,000 active customers in over 40 countries.
usoft GmbH, founded in 1991, serves medium-sized companies with solutions and extensions in the areas of ERP, production control, time and machine data recording. The customer relations go back to the foundation phase and underline the competent and target-oriented cooperation as a win-win relationship.
Thanks to the high customer satisfaction with the new system, usoft is already working on extensions of the web shop solution and on a visualization of the ERP processes with Omnis
Why Omnis
“The vast integration capability of Omnis Studio with all possible systems and even with legacy applications over 30 years old made this project possible in the first place,” emphasizes the developer Manfred Veh of usoft. “And thanks to the high productivity of Omnis, a modern web shop could be set up within a few weeks, which saves scarce developer resources and is of course economically very beneficial.”
Manfred Veh
usoft GmbH