R&R Marketing, one of New Jersey's largest distributors of wines and spirits, has selected Strategic to help Web-enable its customer service system interface using LANSA for the Web, the premier Web application development tool for AS/400 environments.

Without a means for accessing customer information from remote locations, R&R's sales representatives must currently refer to paper files kept at R&R's corporate offices in order to have access to their accounts' payment history, accounts receivable status, special promotions, and delivery tickets. Once physically removed, these files are easily lost, and the information they contain gone forever. The new customer service interface will make this information available from anywhere in the field.

R&R also considered the relative ease of retraining existing IS staff. New hires with specialized skills will not be necessary for the development of the new interface. Strategic has served as mentor to a number of our customers who want to bring their staff up to speed with LANSA for in-house development, and will work with R&R in this capacity, defining the system's scope, developing the full application specification, handling the creative work necessary to create the Web-based user interface and navigation, and providing ongoing project guidance.

After evaluating a number of competing products, R&R selected LANSA. LANSA's proven, repository-based 4GL development environment makes Web-enabling existing AS/400 applications easy, requiring fewer resources and less time than other products. "When we showed them how easy it was to build a Web interface for a 'green screen' application using LANSA for the Web templates, the decision was easy," says David Obermeyer, lead LANSA developer at Strategic.

Our well-known focus on customer satisfaction and reputation as a leader in developing business-to-business intranet and extranet applications using LANSA made us a perfect match for R&R's Web implementation goals. When complete, the Web-based system will allow R&R's sales representatives to easily access a "snapshot" of a customer store's information from the field, including insights into buying patterns, accounts payable history, even scanned images of delivery tickets, using any standard Web browser on lightweight notebook computers with Internet access. This easy access to customer information will help the representatives better serve the needs of their customer stores, providing a competitive advantage for R&R's distribution efforts.

Strategic Business Systems, a LANSA and IBM Business Partner in New Jersey and a leading provider of information systems since 1983, is at the forefront of the integration of Internet technologies into AS/400 environments in a variety of industries. We have helped over fifty companies achieve their Internet objectives, including Mikasa, Panasonic, and Goya Foods.