UNIFACE CommUNIque

Moving the Warehouse into the 21st Century

There are about 800,000 warehouses in the U.S. and 90% of those warehouses still rely on paper-based systems to track inventory, as theyhave done for the past century. But LIOCS, a UNIFACE VAR, is bringing a new generation of client server software into the warehouse that utilizes wireless radio frequency terminals and the latest technologies to improveaccuracy of inventory and efficiency of warehouse personnel.

For over 20, years, LIOCS Corporation has provided manufacturers and distributors with warehouse management software. Until 1990,LIOCS' solutions were based on Open VMS, requiring LIOCS to also sell Digital hardware aspart of their solution. In 1992, the company attempted to deliver a UNIX solution, but without a GUI or RDBMS, the product met with only limited success.

After identifying a significant market opportunity to sell paperlesswarehouse systems, LIOCS began exploring alternatives for redeveloping its applications. Understanding that GUls and platform portability would be critical components of their strategy, they built prototypes to test GUI vendors' claims. Although several products lived up to their portability claims, UNIFACE appeared to be a superior product. In addition, UNIFACE supported OpenVMS, the operating system used by LIOCS' existing base of 600 customers.

With UNIFACE, LIOCS- is free to concentrate on selling its warehouse management expertise. According to Mike Andelman, president of LIOCS Corporation, "We chose UNIFACE in the spring of 1994. Part of the strategic decision to go with UNIFACE Six was based on the product's wide range of deployment platforms.UNIFACE Six client, server and database support allowed us to sell applications based on our capabilities and functionality. It liberated us from selling the platforms-this decision now can be left to our customers."

Rather than simply rewriting their 3GL applications, LIOCS began a complete overhaul of their applications. Understanding that their applications deal with the unique internal structures of each customer, a primary goal to build ease-of-customization into the application. For instance, designed into theapplication architecture is the ability to create as many lookups as desired. According to LIOCS, UNIFACE helped to provide flexibility for future customization.

The re-development effort required about three months of foundation work including training existing staff, creating a data model, and establishing programming standards. After just over a year, six developers had built an application that encompassed nearly 700 forms in UNIFACE.

The development environment at LIOCS is Pentiums with Windows for Workgroups. Testing is done on DEC Alphas running OpenVMS and UNIX, VAX/VMS, HP9000/HP-UX, and RS6000/AIX. The development databases are Oracle and Informix, but the application can be deployed with popular databases.

LIOCS completed the first phase of development of their inventory control and paperless system in September 1995. The new application, PERSPECTIVE/CS Warehouse Control Center, runs a UNIFACE application on the server, with UNIFACE forms running on wireless radio frequency terminals throughout the warehouse. Introduced at the Scantech tradeshow in September, PERSPECTIVE-CS software wasimmediately deployable on the latest Pen Windows-based wireless-PC terminals. Andelman was pleased to acknowledge, "We're uniquely positioned with PERSPECTIVE/CS Warehouse Control
Center to run on this new generation of wirelessterminals."

Andelman continued, "We have been able to create wonderfulapplication software that visually and functionally meets the expectations of both end users and industry consultants who want modern software. We are convinced that the strength of UNIFACE is its compatibility with almost all technologies used by customers or targeted for strategic use. This strength enables our PERSPECTIVE/CS to play nearly anywhere."

For more information about PERSPECTIVE/CS, please contact:

LIOCS Corporation

246 E. Janata Blvd.

Lombard, IL 60148

Tel : +708-953-2220