CGI Brings Profio360 ERP Into the Future with OpenEdge
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Industries:
Business ServicesChallenge
How to ensure Profio360, an ERP solution built 37 years ago on OpenEdge, keeps pace with changing customer needs.
Solution
A long-term, focused and steady approach to continuously evolve and modernize its OpenEdge solution.
Result
The latest modernization effort exceeded customer expectations for their top priority—the ability to readily connect OpenEdge data to other data sources for BI and analytics.
Full Story
Challenge
Profio360, an ERP solution for construction and manufacturing, was originally built on Progress OpenEdge 37 years ago, and despite temptation and pressure over the years to migrate the application to another platform, CGI chose to continuously evolve and modernize Profio360 on OpenEdge.
“It’s a great challenge to keep pace with the changing needs of our customers with the same platform for 37 years,” CGI Account Growth Executive Anna Lehtoranta said, “but a steady focused approach that put client needs front and center helped ensure its success.”
“It’s a great challenge to keep pace with the changing needs of our customers with the same platform for 37 years,” CGI Account Growth Executive Anna Lehtoranta said, “but a steady focused approach that put client needs front and center helped ensure its success.”
Solution
In 2017, CGI did a comprehensive study of its Profio360 customers called “Voice of Our Clients” to learn what was on their clients’ minds regarding industry trends and future functionality. Those findings provided the roadmap for the two-year modernization process that followed. An overwhelming amount of its customers, 85%, planned to focus their innovation investments in data and predictive analytics. Other priorities included security enhancements, the ability to better leverage IoT and mobile, and embrace new IT delivery models to reduce cost and increase agility.
That data in hand, the modernization project was launched to deliver on these customer priorities, but also with the end goal of enabling customers to choose and deploy the features and functionality that were priorities for them.
That data in hand, the modernization project was launched to deliver on these customer priorities, but also with the end goal of enabling customers to choose and deploy the features and functionality that were priorities for them.
Result
CGI had already undergone the transformation of its character-based screens into highly-intuitive visual interactions. Reflecting on the preferences of its customers, CGI decided its next step was to reengineer the Profio360 architecture and productize its API layer to make OpenEdge data available to readily connect with other CGI solutions, BI, analytics and reporting solutions.
CGI looked to Progress Kendo UI to transform its Progress client networking-based screens to deliver the personalized interactions and exceptional user experience its clients were seeking. It was able to deliver these enhanced experiences on any platform, including smartwatches.
“Some of our customers wanted to stay in even older character mode, it’s alright, we let them do that because Progress lets us do that,” Lehtoranta said. “That’s what partnership is all about.”
Lehtoranta noted that early on CGI engineers had the vision to detach Profio360’s business logic from the interface enabling clients to choose any interface they desired without the need to change clients. Another key goal was to productize its API layer to open up Profio360 data to the world, giving clients the connectivity they were asking for.
“Once again OpenEdge gave us that ability,” she said. “Now our clients are free to connect to whatever they need to – other CGI solutions and the analytics, BI and reporting solutions of their choice.”
Moving forward Lehtoranta is determined to continue to evolve the platform so customers reap the benefits of the latest features of OpenEdge, as well as the latest infrastructure improvements that deliver things like enhanced database performance.
“I see that OpenEdge 12 has made significant strides with performance and security,” she said. “Given our commitment to modernization this is something we certainly intend to look into.”
In conclusion, Lehtoranta said, “While we constantly evaluate other platforms and tools, Progress consistently comes up on top. It is such a reliable and capable platform that there is no need to make the change.”
CGI looked to Progress Kendo UI to transform its Progress client networking-based screens to deliver the personalized interactions and exceptional user experience its clients were seeking. It was able to deliver these enhanced experiences on any platform, including smartwatches.
“Some of our customers wanted to stay in even older character mode, it’s alright, we let them do that because Progress lets us do that,” Lehtoranta said. “That’s what partnership is all about.”
Lehtoranta noted that early on CGI engineers had the vision to detach Profio360’s business logic from the interface enabling clients to choose any interface they desired without the need to change clients. Another key goal was to productize its API layer to open up Profio360 data to the world, giving clients the connectivity they were asking for.
“Once again OpenEdge gave us that ability,” she said. “Now our clients are free to connect to whatever they need to – other CGI solutions and the analytics, BI and reporting solutions of their choice.”
Moving forward Lehtoranta is determined to continue to evolve the platform so customers reap the benefits of the latest features of OpenEdge, as well as the latest infrastructure improvements that deliver things like enhanced database performance.
“I see that OpenEdge 12 has made significant strides with performance and security,” she said. “Given our commitment to modernization this is something we certainly intend to look into.”
In conclusion, Lehtoranta said, “While we constantly evaluate other platforms and tools, Progress consistently comes up on top. It is such a reliable and capable platform that there is no need to make the change.”