With WebSphere Portal, Zeeman has a versatile development platform that can also be used widely in the future.
'En route to 1000 shops in Europe' - can be read in yellow and blue on the lorries which arrive and depart at Zeeman textielSupers in Alphen aan den Rijn. The group formulated this goal four years ago, and in the meantime there are 930 textielSupers in the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. Automation is essential for this rapid growth. Zeeman recently developed, in cooperation with IBM Business Partner Inter Access, a procurement portal based on IBM WebSphere. Bowstreet Portlet Factory was used as a development tool.
"From the organisation came the question of improving the process for intake and checking of orders", states Theo Wouters, ICT Manager at Zeeman. "This process is still now largely carried out manually. Agents in the Far East fill in an order form for each purchase and forward this to the Dutch head office. There various steps follow. The declarant adds statistical numbers, the purchaser makes a preliminary calculation, the procurement manager signs for final agreement, the purchasing assistant deals with the process administratively. This way of working has a number of disadvantages. It isn’t clear how many orders are in the pipeline and where they are. Through the enormous stream of paperwork, orders can get mislaid or end up in the wrong pile. Moreover, the forms are often filled in by hand and are not always easy to read. The agent and purchaser then have to call each other many times over. This leads to unnecessary delays and costs."
To streamline the procurement process, in 2004, Zeeman was on the lookout for an application in which orders could be entered directly. A portal seemed the most suitable solution. Given that Zeeman already worked with an IBM iSeries system and Lotus Notes, Domino and DB2, the choice of WebSphere Portal was obvious. Wouters: "This portal provides the possibility of integrating various applications and is also easy to maintain." In selecting a development tool, the fact that Zeeman already had a Java/J2EE portal constructed played a role. From this experience, they decided to implement a development tool that would enable faster and better development without dependency on an external party. Bowstreet Portlet Factory seemed very suitable. This allows portlets to be simply constructed, adapted, managed and rolled out. After a short training course, every employee can get on with it directly. Given Inter Access is the only party in Benelux with a cooperation with Bowstreet, Zeeman asked this company to develop and implement the procurement portal.
With the new procurement portal at Zeeman, the entire chain is visible - from the first entry of data by the agent up to and including approval by the procurement manager. If an order lies for too long, directly targeted action is possible. Everyone involved in the process can see every morning when they open the portal an overview of the orders to be processed. Moreover, the approval and control processes are digital and agreed orders can also be forwarded digitally to the supplier. "Previously, the entire process took ten days under optimum circumstances", says Wouters. "That now theoretically is one day, although in practice, of course, it takes a bit longer. But the time saving is enormous. Moreover, we always have a complete overview of order status and that automatically provides fast processing of the order stream." The layout of the original form has remained the same, but agents can select certain information, such as type of delivery and port, from a list. In so doing, the chance for uncertainty has appreciably decreased. Securing the system received a lot of attention, with a DMZ (DeMilitarized Zone) between the Internet and the Intranet. Furthermore, when logging in, the system checks the rights of agents and they have access only to their own orders.
The first test was conducted in July 2005, in which a major agent in Hong Kong introduced the first contract. It is expected, that the portal will be used by all agents at the beginning of 2006. Although the project is still in the test phase, employees are already quite enthusiastic. Zeeman sees various opportunities for expansion. Wouters: "It is the intention that all shops will shortly have a DSL connection to the head office. If we get that far, we can also use WebSphere for other applications, for example to ensure that sickness reports reach the head office directly." It is also conceivable that branches exchange item data or other information. In short, with WebSphere Portal, Zeeman has a versatile development platform that can also be used widely in the future.