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Daisy whirligigs and lighted garden gnomes are the stuff of Russ Snella's days -- and other people's lawns. As director of IT for Art Line Inc., a $50-million Chicago distributor of lawn and garden ornaments, Snella is half of a two-man IT shop running a system that tracks shipping and purchase orders from around the world.
A while back, he discovered that his Gentran electronic data interchange (EDI) data mapping system and his SouthWare enterprise resource planning system couldn't integrate. So Snella went shopping for translation software. "It had to be powerful enough and flexible enough to go from any source to my COBOL system," Snella says. He didn't waste time with vendors but sought out someone with firsthand experience: his former database administrator, who suggested Data Junction. Snella was quickly able to use Pervasive Software (which now owns Data Junction) Business Integrator to translate 850 EDI purchase orders into the company's MySQL database and its COBOL system. "We saw ROI within six months," says Snella, due to a reduction in data entry staff.
In his own yard, Snella has twin cherubs (in honor of his twins) and a pink flamingo. But the company's new project really revs him up. "We are going live with a whole Web-based shipping interface," says Snella. "That's where we are going to have our ROI again and again."
Problem solved.
Ellen O'Brien, a former senior editor at CIO Decisions, is now a senior editor at Storage magazine. Write to her at eobrien@techtarget.com.
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