Demco, Inc.

Demco Role

I was hired on as a C# developer at Demco, but also turned out to include business analyst role and tier III software support and development for their in-house ERP system written in the LANSA framework running on the IBM i.

Highlighted Projects

ETL Transformation Integrations

My first two projects I did were very similar. It involved creating an export program that would extract data from the ERP and e-commerce databases and generate an XML feed that was sent via FTP to Certona and Bazaarvoice services (these services supported integrations to the e-commerce platform).

Supplier Catalog Email Campaigns

A department did a manual process of sending our product catalog's pages to suppliers for review. For 400+ suppliers they would create an email, attach one more PDFs (each page a single PDF, having to create two emails if there were too many pages), and then track responses and status in a spreadsheet. This took many man hours and was only done once a year.

Leading the project and working with a junior developer we created an application integrated into the ERP (so using the LANSA framework, most working in RDMLX). It let them list all suppliers, build a mailing list of suppliers, and automatically send emails. Sent emails had a dynamic template and only a single PDF that we created by merging all individual pages. They could then track responses in the application. Follow up emails would be sent automatically.

While development time went a little but over scope, lots of time was saved with the new efficient process. What was a long manual process for a whole team, now could be prepared and sent out in mere hours. They also now plan on doing the email campaign more than once a year to keep the catalog information more up to date.

Jasper Reporting Integration

Most reporting out of the ERP system was plain text (look up spool files for the IBM i). That or a data dump in a CSV that was emailed to the user. When I joined on there was no way of creating graphical reports (e.g. formated WYSIWYG style reports). I was exposed to Crystal reports at my previous job at Suttle-Straus, so I looked into reporting options. In spare time found and researched using Jasper reports as an integration into our ERP system.

I did initial testing and coding of APIs in the ERP system so that now any developer can generate a Jasper report out of the ERP system. The trial run report was actually what spurned on the final development of the report as it was a customer facing quote document for high profile custom orders. Pretty much all of the department's requests were met with the new graphical reporting we could do with Jasper reports.

Besides creating the API for developers to use in the ERP (via RDMLX code) I created a dynamic form that could be used by developers to boot strap reports that take user input. The form would call the Jasper Server's API to get the parameters required for the report and dynamically display those parameters to the users on the form.