Fax Software VAR deploys RightFax Workflow in Canada

Shared Network Applications & Process Solutions, Inc., (SNAPS) Announces
First International SNAPSflow® Integration.

Calgary-based, CE Franklin streamlines business processes with barcode
routing – resulting in quicker billing cycles and employee efficiencies.


Atlanta, Georgia, July 26, 2004 – Shared Network Applications & Process Solutions, Inc., (SNAPS), announced today that the company has recently completed its first international deployment of SNAPSflow® - a workflow middleware engine that automates document flow within an organization.

CE Franklin, based in Calgary, Canada, distributes materials to large oil and gas companies primarily in Canada. The company has implemented the SNAPSflow solution to facilitate the receipt, processing and invoicing of customer orders from their 37 distribution centers located throughout Canada. The distribution centers act as “shipping and receiving” hubs where customers place orders and pick-up their materials.

In order to insure the accuracy of their invoices, CE Franklin requires that the customer representative who picks up the order sign the packing slip that lists the items they are picking up. At the end of the day, each distribution center sends all of the signed packing slips to CE Franklin’s corporate office, via a courier service, so the invoice process can begin. The packing slips are first matched to the customer’s order sheet, any discrepancies between what was ordered and what was picked up are noted and then an invoice is generated by the accounts receivable department. During this largely manual process, CE Franklin utilizes a JD Edwards ERP system, to generate the packing slips, and FormScape, a forms-generating software package, to format and print them.

“The SNAPSflow barcode application was a perfect solution for CE Franklin”, stated Pete English, SNAPS, Inc. President. “Once we learned and understood their business workflow, the answer was obvious. SNAPSflow can read barcodes”, continued English, “so once FormScape placed barcodes on the packing slips that could be matched to specific customer information, SNAPSflow did the rest”.

With SNAPSflow, the distribution centers fax all of their signed packing slips to CE Franklin’s headquarters each day. SNAPSflow automatically reads the barcode on each packing slip, separates the slips into individual documents and queries the JD Edwards database and finds the corresponding order sheet. “Automating this process, alone, cut costs and increased our productivity significantly”, said David Curran, CE Franklin, IT Manager. “The number of lost documents has been significantly reduced, our invoicing process has been improved, allowing us to send invoices and receive payment from our customers faster and, lastly, our employees are much more productive”.


SNAPSflow, a workflow middleware engine comprised of software applications, enhances the functionality of fax servers by performing complex workflows that require little, to no, custom programming. CE Franklin already had a RightFax® server integrated into their network and was researching ways to leverage their RightFax investment when they discovered SNAPSflow. “SNAPSflow was the only product we found that could read barcodes and read external databases”, said Curran. “Currently, we are looking into the possibility of using SNAPSflow for several future-planned initiatives, as well.”

SNAPS, a Platinum-level RightFax reseller, has been integrating RightFax servers and writing applications for major fax server providers such as Biscom and RightFax for over 15 years. “Working with SNAPS has been a pleasure”, continued Curran, “they have been extremely responsive and flexible during the entire process, plus, SNAPSflow does exactly what they said it would”.

About SNAPS, Inc.

SNAPS, Inc., headquartered in Atlanta, GA. since 1986, develops and markets routing and workflow software and is one of the largest fax-integration companies in the United States. The company offers business-to-business clients, enterprise-based solutions including:

· SNAPSflow “intelligent routing” software that automates the flow of documents and manual tasks within an organization.
· Document management solutions encompassing fax, data/image capture, voice recognition and electronic workflow.
· Proven business applications and IT products, such as RightFax, from leading vendors, such as Captaris, Inc. the world leader in e-document delivery, production fax and network fax servers.
· Nationwide installations of RightFax servers
· Integration, consulting, training and support services.

For more information about SNAPS, Inc., visit our Web site at http://www.snapsinc.com/


©2004 SNAPS. All rights reserved. SNAPS, Inc. products: SNAPSsolutions and SNAPSflow, are registered trademarks of SNAPS, Inc. RightFax is a registered trademark of Captaris. FormScape is a registered trademark of FormScape Group, Ltd., All other company, brand and product names are the property and/or trademarks of their respective companies.

Middleware grows up

CIO Magazine
August 2004
MIDDLEWARE
Proprietary to Open:

Middleware EvolvesToday's CIOs depend on middleware more than ever. First-generation products were child's play compared to what the current technology can do.By Lauren Gibbons PaulLONDON INSTITUTIONAL brokerage Prebon Yamane Group could be considered a throwback in at least one regard. In this age of e-business, its brokers take orders exclusively by telephone from institutions all over the world.
But in another sense, Prebon is on the cutting edge. Its technology group uses sophisticated middleware from Sonic Software to ensure that its customers and brokers get almost immediate electronic trade confirmation; previously, they would have waited hours or even days for fax notification that the deal had gone through.Since Prebon is a voice brokerage, the capability to send online, near-real-time confirmation of clients' trade details boosts customer service. "This is a revenue exercise. We're aiming to retain our customers by giving them greater efficiency in dealing with us," says Geoffrey Sanderson, CEO of Prebon Technology Group, the IT arm of the US$434 million brokerage.The software Prebon uses—SonicMQ—is an enterprise message server. And it's merely one example of the variety of modern products that expand on middleware's traditional role as "glue" to tie together disparate applications. With a generous push from XML and Web services, middleware has moved away from proprietary schemes towards flexible, open standards. And new vendors such as Ascential Software and Sonic Software have joined traditional players such as Tibco and Information Builders in offering cost-effective applications that target specific pieces of the integration puzzle.Rather than going away, traditional middleware has branched out into subtypes including service-oriented architecture (SOA), enterprise service bus (ESB), business process management (BPM) and Web services. The diversification results from an increasing need for CIOs to find ways to integrate evermore disparate systems, from ancient mainframe applications to the latest Java servers. Integration, and therefore middleware, is today's cost of doing business.Early DaysMiddleware first appeared in the mid-1980s (though the term itself didn't take firm hold until the 1990s and has morphed in meaning over the years). Even at the dawn of the client/server revolution, large companies were grappling with how to extract data from mainframe systems and serve it to other platforms. Middleware provided that connection. Unfortunately, these products used proprietary frameworks for communication, and they often required hand-coding for each system. The result was costly software and long-term projects that focused on making the IT function more efficient rather than delivering and retaining customers or igniting sales."Traditional middleware was too expensive, too hard, took too long and required too much training. It was very IT-centric," says Eric Austvold, research director for enterprise applications and technology strategies at AMR Research.Because each connection among systems had to be coded manually, first-generation middleware was also very inflexible. If a mortgage company wanted to change the maximum age for a borrower from 60 to 70, for example, there was no way to make the change in one place and have it cascade through all affected data. As a result, maintenance of systems connected by middleware was expensive.And the companies' investments of money and time made it easy for their vendors to sell them multiple products and services. "They used middleware to entice you in," recalls Sanderson, who has used various middleware products for many years. Once you committed to one vendor's platform, it was tough to change and there was every reason to keep buying more from that one company.But during the 1990s, the drumbeat of standards began to grow louder. Customers started to push software vendors to offer application programming interfaces (APIs) as backdoors into their closed environments, thus making integration easier.Then the Internet took hold, with its plethora of data transmission and access standards, including HTTP, FTP, simple object access protocol (SOAP) and XML. The last of these set the stage for Web services, a relatively simple, standardised way of integrating applications. The goal, ultimately, is to go beyond simply linking applications loosely together, but instead to integrate pieces as needed, quickly and easily, thereby creating "composite applications."For their part, middleware vendors voice support for standards in the same breath they defend their proprietary value-add. "Standards reduce our development cost," says Ram Menon, senior vice president of worldwide marketing at Tibco. "XML is a normalised format. It will get the data moving, but the applications still can't talk to each other."It's hardly surprising that vendors are trying to carve out their own special place in this volatile, near US$1 billion market. But they make some moves grudgingly. "If you're BEA, you still don't want your stuff to be used in an IBM project. If you want to connect BEA to IBM, you can do that thanks to standards, but you can't expect BEA to be happy about it," says Gerry Cohen, president and CEO of Information Builders."The large vendors are seeing the benefits of being open. They're not 100 percent there, but they are much more open than they were," adds Barney Sene, vice president and CTO for WellPoint, a US$20 billion health insurance company. The second-largest health insurer in the U.S., WellPoint uses IBM's MQSeries Integrator middleware to form a bridge between the legacy systems that process member claims and the Web-based, IVR and EDI customer-facing systems so that its employees can better serve customer needs.But despite all the talk of standards, Prebon's Sanderson, a veteran user of all the big-name middleware packages, remains sceptical that proprietary middleware schemes are a thing of the past. "They can talk openness and standards, but I have to sign the cheques. It's a fairly obvious strategy [to push a single architecture], I don't blame them for it," he says. On the other hand, he doesn't want anything to do with it. Sanderson and Patrick McGrath, head of technical strategy, are pursuing a strictly best-of-breed integration approach; a strategy predicated on open standards.Sanderson has the luxury of spending the money necessary for best of breed since he is in the financial services industry, which competes on being able to serve its customers better information faster than its competitors. "Technology is a key differentiator in what they do," says Austvold. "They are taking on quite a burden in terms of managing different technologies and vendor relationships, but it may well be worth it."What makes this complexity worthwhile is the ability to put information in the hands of those who did not have it before. Steve Elkins, manager of business intelligence for Capella University in Minneapolis, used Ascential's MetaStage tool to let his users perform their own queries on a new data warehouse. Previously, if the school's dean wanted to see how many students failed the advanced management course, for instance, he would have had to ask an IT person to query the legacy reporting database and then wait days or weeks for the result. Now, Ascential's DataStage product pulls the data from Capell's business systems and delivers it to the data warehouse. Ascential MetaStage provides the "data dictionary" that makes the data in the warehouse understandable for the school's users. Brio's business intelligence tool then acts as the user interface for both the data from the data warehouse and the explanatory meta-data in the MetaStage data dictionary.Since MetaStage maps types of data from one application (such as the warehouse) to another (such as the business intelligence tool), MetaStage effectively integrates the two, making data accessible where it was not before. Previously, only three IT people at Capella were skilled enough to know how to query the legacy reporting database. With MetaStage doing the heavy lifting of translating between applications and serving the data in an easily comprehensible format, now more than 100 university personnel can do their own queries, greatly improving productivity.Striving for SimplicityIncreased end-use efficiency isn't the only goal of modern middleware; one of the biggest trends is to simplify maintenance tasks as much as possible, thereby reducing costs. Towards that end, WellPoint's Sene recently began evaluating technology from a startup called Pantero. Pantero's Shared Data Services (SDS) tool reconciles the inconsistencies in data between WellPoint's many enterprise systems. Pantero SDS manages the rules that govern data usage and interpretation so that data is interoperable and accessible across the organisation. "Pantero runs on top of our systems and makes it easier to build and manage the adapters and connectors that bridge the systems," says Sene. The key to Pantero is reusability. "You can have hundreds of those adapters and connectors and it is a huge maintenance nightmare. Pantero helps us manage them. I don't have to hire as many people to do the hard coding for those connectors. It's a major cost reduction," says Sene.Like Ascential's MetaStage, Pantero also does data mapping between systems so that there is a common representation of data for various entities in the enterprise. "We have a common data model and we map all our legacy systems to the model. It makes things much easier. We're not doing it manually, so our costs are reduced," says Sene. Sene has built an SOA in which nuggets of software functionality can be re-used among systems.To Guido Sacchi, speed and agility are the best payoffs of standardising the data architecture. "Connecting our systems via standards shrinks our time-to-market," says Sacchi, CIO at CompuCredit, an Atlanta-based credit card and financial services company. "We need fast integration of credit portfolios that we acquire and high efficiency in our collections." For example, CompuCredit telephone agents no longer need to put customers on hold to consult other parts of the organisation, since they can access the information they need directly, reducing call times and increasing customer satisfaction. Sacchi uses an SOA based on middleware from Software AG in conjunction with a variety of standards, including XML, SOAP and UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration). The new architecture builds interoperability between different systems and databases. It gives all users the "one version of the truth" (where everyone sees the same data) because of an XML meta-data repository. The business advantages include better customer service, more exact tailoring of product offerings and better information for the agents.So many businesses have benefited from the integration through middleware that they have had a powerful collective effect—even on the world economy as a whole, according to Austvold. And while it's certainly far from the only reason (outsourcing and consolidation also play a large role), middleware's efficiency is even contributing to the so-called jobless recovery, he notes. Integration technology has helped industries from manufacturing to telecommunications cut masses of employees. Those jobs are not coming back any time soon—bittersweet testimony to the success of what was born as middleware two decades ago.

Lauren Gibbons Paul is a freelance writer based in Massachusetts.