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Basta
Parsons
4
. Deployment
Involved
from the onset Aaron Keane from Novavision managed the
project from the problem definition phase, through integration
issues to the roll out of the pilot site. Novavision
already had experience e-enabling other manufacturing
industries such as Mercedes in Switzerland. Aaron explained
that Basta wanted to build a web site that would grow
to a B2B site. They wanted to provide enterprise information
to their customers swiftly and easily. Clients would
be able to log into the site and get instant information
on their account status and order new stock.
“The largest problem we came across in the project
was the streamlining of Basta’s product catalogue.
In hind sight, Novavision should have been involved
for another week in the initial phase to sort the product
book,” explained Aaron, “Manufacturing systems
tend to have archaic programs and data structures, not
suited to displaying in an HTML format. The whole product
catalogue had to be re-written and re-structured in
order to display products on the web site in a logical
manner”. HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is the
standard code used to describe how the content of a
Web page should be displayed and interacted with.
As Basta had limited in-house web experience, Novavision
recommended their system be housed and managed on a
web farm. This solution also kept costs down to a minimum,
with Basta avoiding purchasing costly hardware. “The
web server is now sitting on a web farm with pricing
based on the space taken – the more space used
the more Basta pay,” remarked Aaron, “In addition
to reduce costs, Basta opted for a back up system based
on tape drives rather than having a third machine to
back up the system. Rather than pay IRE£6,000
for a server, Basta bought a tape drive at IRE£600.This
solution provided 24x7 cover along with a back up facility
to provide system resilience at a low cost”.
Integration took longer than first anticipated. The
Irish manufacturing system in operation was supplied
by a third party. Novavision estimated that the integration
of Basta's web site and the manufacturing system would
take one week. "Unfortunately during the project,
the ERP Supplier lost their programming team. This lead
to an increased volume of work being done by Novavision
in the programming of the integration interface,"
warned Aaron, "instead of one week this phase took
three weeks to complete. This was an unexpected and
unfortunate occurrence and one it would have been impossible
to predict".
As Basta selected IBM’s ‘Web Sphere’
product as their web server, they have huge potential
to utilise some of the other features this product brings.
“The system is designed to be easily expanded”
said Aaron, “In the future the company will grow
and its operation will become more dependant on eCommerce.
The server selected can facilitate this expansion utilising
features such as database integration, and support for
standard data formats such as XML (eXtended Mark-up
Language) which is an industry standard data formatting
language allowing similar businesses to share common
data types.
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