For professional tradesmen and do-it-yourself enthusiasts, the sprawling 400,000 square foot warehouse of iconic British brand Draper Tools is a dream come true. It is considered to be the largest cache of such items under one roof in the entire United Kingdom.
Founded in 1919, the company is now is the brand of choice for auto mechanics, joiners, electricians and others. Although the tools are available through dealers throughout the UK, a growing proportion of its tools are sold through its refreshingly straightforward website.
Draper Tools recently revamped its business-to-consumer (B2C) website to make browsing and ordering effortless for customers and routine site maintenance enjoyable for its technicians. To complete this project, the company licensed WebSmart, the iSeries web development tool from BCD Software (now Fresche Solutions) through Proximity.
Colin Richmond, Draper’s IT Manager, was frustrated by the limitations of Draper’s Windows NT-based B2C web application; slow response times forcing users to wait unnecessarily; while customers had to use three to four mouse clicks to find the right tool for them resulting in a poor customer online experience.
Replacing this system with WebSmart applications presented an attractive and cost-effective way for Draper Tools to take maximum advantage of the iSeries, eliminate the NT box, and provide better user experiences for customers and business partners alike.
Before settling on WebSmart, Richmond looked at several web application development environments that would produce executables for the company’s IBM iSeries Model 820 and found them either to be very expensive or too difficult to programme in.
In contrast, Richmond was able to license WebSmart and have his developers work with the software within a matter of weeks.
With no formal training, four members of the six-person development team at Draper began developing code with WebSmart by sharing tips with each other. Despite having 10 to 20-plus years of RPG coding experience and very little HTML or PHP development experience to their credit, the team quickly learned how to use WebSmart’s templates and how to customise them with ProGen Macro Language (PML).
Their first objective was to replace Drapers’ existing B2C online shopping cart. Having no previous experience with WebSmart or other web development technologies, they wrote an entire iSeries-based (AS400) catalogue and shopping cart application in just under five months.
Draper’s in-house graphics design team worked on custom buttons and banners that had a look and feel that was consistent with the company’s branding. Developers then integrated these graphical components into the WebSmart PDWs.
With a full head of steam, developers wrote a customised search feature using WebSmart’s unique “root word search” functionality. This let them combine several files for searching purposes without having to build a complex SQL string each time a customer wanted to find an item. This search feature is uniquely intelligent as it uses a table of synonyms against a search term to find an item. For example, if a visitor on the B2C website keys in “lamps,” the search returns a list of items containing the terms “torches” and “lights.”
They also moved the existing product catalogue containing 15,000 items from the NT machine to the iSeries. This database also serves as the basis of the company’s hard-copy mail order print catalogue. Since the existing product catalogue was already written in HTML and had an extensive collection of images for all products, they simply moved it from the NT to the iSeries (AS400) by importing the product descriptions directly as HTML into the iSeries database.
Now, when the WebSmart programme draws a product detail page, it simply pulls the HTML from the product catalogue database on the iSeries (AS400) into the page. Item availability is always represented in real-time because the shopping cart application also ties into the back-end inventory control system.
The payment process is handled through a WebSmart API that connects with a Web Service that clears credit card transactions. Once the order is complete, Draper’s shopping cart application sends an HTML-formatted email to the customer to confirm the details. This is handled by WebSmart’s native email functions.
After completing the B2C site, Draper’s IT team wrote a simple online ordering system for export customers. This has replaced a fax ordering system that required each order to be keyed twice – once by the customer and again by the Draper sales team. Draper also replaced several queries with a simple web page that lets users select options for extracting information from the database to produce an Excel-compatible spreadsheet in CSV format.
“It used to take me half an hour to write one single query request for a user, and I wrote this entire application in half an hour with WebSmart”
says Richmond.
Like tradesmen, IT professionals who are responsible for programme development have an appreciation for good tools. According to Richmond,
“WebSmart has been well received by our developers. I love it. It is very, very quick, and the end results show how successful it is.”
Richmond also has an appreciation for the ease with which he and his coding staff can maintain WebSmart-developed programmes.
“Other development tools allow you to develop applications but then if you want to make changes later on, it’s very difficult. With WebSmart, I have found that you can get right back into the programme. I also think it’s easier than writing RPG code, and I pride myself on being a good RPG programmer.”
Rather than coding in RPG, Richmond now uses WebSmart to do non-web batch programming because of the powerful functions built into WebSmart such as scanstr (scan string) and rplstr (replace string).
“It’s faster than coding in RPG and is quite useful,”
he says.
Aside from customers using the new site to access product information, Draper employees are also using the new B2C site extensively. According to Richmond,
“we look up product descriptions, prices and illustrations of products. It is used all the time because it’s very fast.”
Richmond’s next project is to replace Draper’s business-to-business (B2B) site with one developed in WebSmart. He knows he and his team have learned a lot from developing the B2C site and he anticipates rapid development and deployment. He is also considering using BCD’s Nexus Portal as a framework for this application to bring a higher level of organisation to the B2B site.
Proximity can arrange free evaluations on all BCD Software products, please contact us now.
WebSmart is a charter member of the IBM iSeries Developer roadmap.
Posted by Paul on 11th August 2014.