Auto Parts Warehouse Picks eSP to Replace IBM Wireless Connection

When IBM decided to abandon its Wireless Connection for AS/400 with OS/400 V5R1, many companies were left in the lurch to replace their wireless barcode scanning system. One of the companies that relied on Wireless Connection was Interamerican Motor Corp., a California company that imports and distributes foreign auto parts. Without a solid substitute, IMC had cycled through three different products since 2001, but eventually found what it considers a good replacement with eBusiness Solution Pros‘ Stay Linked OS/400 software.

From its headquarters near Los Angeles, IMC uses an iSeries Model 820 server to control the flow of 80,000 different German, Swedish, British, and Asian auto parts among its seven distribution centers in California, Oregon, Washington, and Pennsylvania. The company wrote its own OS/400 inventory-tracking and order-processing applications, which are specialized to fit its needs.

Before its upgrade to OS/400 V5R1, in 2001, IBM’s Wireless Connection for AS/400 was an integral part of IMC’s success. The software connected IMC’s inventory control programs with its radio frequency wireless barcode scanners, which, in turn, are the main user input devices for IMC’s warehouse workers.

Wireless Connection worked well for IMC because it was host-based and delivered superior uptime when compared with client/server setups that relied on finicky handheld wireless scanners to work, says Jorge Rodriguez, a WAN/LAN administrator and senior programmer for IMC. When Wireless Connection was no longer compatible with OS/400, it did not sit well with IMC. “We were really upset that IBM dropped support on that software,” Rodriguez says. “We were running our business on it.”

‘IT WAS REALLY BAD’

When IMC upgraded to OS/400 V5R1, it replaced Wireless Connection with one of the only radio frequency middleware products available for the OS/400 installed base, a collection of programs called Wavelink, sold by Wavelink in Kirkland, Washington, and its business partner, eBusiness Solution Pros in Tustin, California. Unlike Wireless Connection, Wavelink was a client/server program and required a separate Windows or Unix gateway to serve 5250 screens.

Almost immediately after the Wavelink installation, Rodriguez started getting “weird errors,” and warehouse workers experienced dropped sessions between their barcode scanner guns and the OS/400 server. “It had a lot of problems,” Rodriguez says. “Every time a session was dropped, the workers would come out of the warehouse, into my office, to get help restarting their connection. We’d have to kill the job on the AS/400 and reset the status, so it took five minutes. I was spending 40 to 50 percent of my time taking care of dropped connections. . . . It was really bad.”

According to eSP, which has done return-on-investment calculations on its products, for every dropped session that costs 15 minutes of downtime, the company loses $25. If there’s an average of five dropped sessions per day, a facility would lose $125 per day, or $30,000 per year. These are generic calculations, but they illustrate the approximate level of inefficiency that IMC was experiencing as a result of its Wavelink installation.

By Rodriguez’s account, the Wavelink product was having an effect on IMC’s business. “We were starting to miss deliveries or to be late on deliveries,” Rodriguez says. “Our customer support was suffering. We received complaints from customers. We missed a significant number [of deliveries], to the point where we needed to fix the situation.”

IMC gained new features and functions with OS/400 V5R1, but it also represented a step backward, because it couldn’t use the tried and true Wireless Connection for AS/400. IMC had been forced to take something that worked and change it to something that hurt customer service. It had violated every midrange manager’s cardinal rule: Do no harm.

STICKING WITH ESP

About one year after the Wavelink installation, Rodriguez was on the wireless middleware hunt once again. He found several other client/server-type solutions running on Windows or Unix, but found very few programs running natively on the OS/400 server. At about that time, eSP rolled out an upgrade to Wavelink, which it was calling eSP-Link.

With eSP-Link, partners eSP and Wavelink had eliminated the requirement for the Windows or Unix gateway, and now the solution resided entirely on the OS/400 server. This represented a “huge improvement” in reliability over Wavelink, Rodriguez says. “eSP-Link solved all of the problems that Wavelink had,” he says.

IMC purchased eSP-Link, and Rodriguez once again began an upgrade. This upgrade went more smoothly than the previous one, although Rodriguez did need to reset each of IMC’s 70 barcode scanner guns one at a time. The reset was needed in order to install eSP’s lightweight 5250 emulator, which was needed to eliminate the Windows gateway.

Rodriguez says eSP-Link dropped his scanner downtime to almost zero and bumped up IMC’s on-time delivery rate by 3 or 4 percent. This led him to give the product the kind of praise that every midrange software vendor loves to hear: “It just does what we need it to do,” Rodriguez says of eSP-Link. “It just works.”

ONE MORE FOR GOOD MEASURE

Last year, eSP launched a third wireless product, called Stay-Linked (see “eBusiness Solutions Pros Launches New RF Software for OS/400”). While similar to eSP-Link in most ways, Stay-Linked brings some important changes, such as the elimination of the Wavelink development kit, which, eSP says, was overkill. Stay-Link is also entirely developed by eSP; Wavelink and eSP are no longer business partners.

eSP sought to develop a simpler wireless middleware system with Stay-Linked, from the user’s perspective. For example, its “session keep-alive” feature is designed to return a barcode scanner user to the same place in the 5250 program when a wireless session is dropped, therefore eliminating the need to restart the session. Also, because the software supports OS/400 device naming, a second gun can pick up where the first gun left off when the first gun experiences a fatal error.

IMC has made the upgrade to Stay-Linked, and Rodriguez reports several benefits. First, the upgrade is easier, because updates can be “flashed” to scanners over the airwaves, eliminating the requirement to upgrade them manually, one by one. Also, Stay-Linked supports IMC’s older Telxon 960SL scanners, which became obsolete when Symbol Technologies acquired Telxon and killed the product line. Rodriguez says Stay-Linked simultaneously supports the old Telxon 960SL scanners using the legacy TMA wireless protocol, and the new Symbol scanners IMC is rolling out over the newer 802.11 wireless standard, side by side. “You don’t need to do anything with the software,” Rodriguez says. “It’s very easy.”

Lastly, monitoring and management has been improved with Stay-Linked, and IMC just may have finally found a product that exceeds the old IBM software they were forced to abandon more than three years ago. “I can sit here at my desk and monitor devices running in Pennsylvania,” Rodriguez says. “I can flash software to any device, send messages, and see what the workers are doing from my desk. We didn’t even have that with IBM Wireless Connection.”