Size does not matter!
Research programme for small companies
A small Upper Austrian enterprise with 14 employees is making grandiose achievements, and they vest their trust in the research and development competence of SCCH.
Overview
The data processing company DGR specializes in meeting the IT requirements of construction subcontractors. HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning as well as electrical and sanitary) as well as plumbing, flooring and painting contractors trust a powerful application based on RPG/AS400 for processing and controlling their enterprise processes. DGR developed this application over the last 20 years to support estimates and bid proposal management. The system provided the user with a terminal application that did have a graphical user interface, but lacked the full comfort of modern GUI technology. Thus the challenge was to develop a solution that retained all branch-specific details while affording the full comfort of a modern rich client interface.
Challenge
In a joint research and development project with SCCH, DGR extensively examined the individual aspects of such a solution. General access component solutions for enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems were designed and developed on the basis of Eclipse Rich Client Platform, EMF (Eclipse Modeling Framework) and EJB 3 (Enterprise JavaBeans). The research project produced concepts for building generic, reusable components for rapid development of ERP systems and conducted a proof of concept of their Smart Migration strategy, which emerged from a previous joint project between DGR and SCCH.
Solution
The developed prototype is based on Open Source technology, which brings the advantage of free license and executability on different hardware platforms such as Windows, Linux and IBM-i5. Due to this technology, the solution is readily extensible and thus represents an ambitious requirement with respect to the usability of such systems in the branch. In retrospect DGR CEO Robert Rosenauer states: "Our cooperation with SCCH proved so outstanding and trustworthy that we will take further development steps with the SCCH team."