The results of the migration have been significant, thanks to the help of the Progress DataDirect. Stewart’s team has noticed an 80-90 percent increase in screen refresh speeds within one of its key applications.
“We have a screen that is part of the purchasing process containing all information a buyer needs to complete the work,” said Stewart. “Prior to implementing Progress DataDirect, the screen would take up to six minutes to refresh. Now, the same screen loads within 1-6 seconds. This enables our users to be far more productive and efficient, and reduces frustration.”
Simply upgrading the legacy ERP has increased reporting efficiency, but Progress DataDirect pushes speedups to new levels. “The new SQL database is super-fast,” said Stewart. “For example, pulling shipping and tracking numbers to generate reports for a customer used to take about 45 minutes; now we can run the report in about a minute. Our main ERP is just a simple GUI that runs on the client side, but most of the work is handled on the backend over an ODBC connection—DataDirect has really sped it up,” said Stewart.
Stewart said adopting the DataDirect connectors was a much faster, more economical solution than building a solution from scratch. “We probably saved at least 12 months in development time using DataDirect,” he said. “In man-hours and general aggravation, I’d say we save close to $25K per year, considering it takes someone just 10 percent of the time to do their work.” By providing such efficiency and time savings, the image of Stewart’s team among sales reps has improved significantly.
Stewart said his team will be looking into connecting the SQL database to its SAP BI system over the next year, and will likely turn to Progress for help with that project, as well.