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Autumn 1998
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Hosiery manufacturers Wolsey have retained their software and skill investment whilst keeping an eye on the future with jBASE on Windows NT.
The 18th Century bought many historical events including the French Revolution, American Independence and the discovery of Australia by Captain Cook. However, long before all these events, a man called Henry Wood had started his hosiery business at Leicester in the heart of England. Having a company survive over 250 years is no mean feat - it shows forward thinking and sound business practice, decade after decade.
Today moving well beyond socks, Wolsey Ltd are a very well respected and envied clothing supplier with customers including Debenhams, House of Fraser, Costco, and the British Royal family. While the business grew, information technology came to play a central part in every aspect of the company’s business operation, from sales administration and stock control, to design, office automation and accounting.
Although Wolsey were relatively satisfied with the custom built programs written in-house for their MDIS Reality system, in 1997 it was time to evaluate their options and move on. They were looking forward to the next decade and the challenges and business change that would bring. They needed a computer system that would be reliable and flexible enough to meet today’s challenges, as well as tomorrow’s, head on.
In the words of Wolsey’s Financial Director, Peter Forrett: “We had thousands of man-hours invested in our business software and we were not about to give that up.” At the same time, they wanted to make use of desktop applications to manipulate the decades of data that had accumulated.
In stepped jBASE Software with promises of speed, desktop interoperability and flexibility. Forrett recalls their claims were quite optimistic to say the least. Asking jBASE Software to prove themselves, Forrett sent his technical team armed with a backup of his most complex applications. Forrett explained: “They did just that, two hours later, our system, developed over many years was there running on Windows NT, faster than it ever had. They went on to demonstrate how easily they could manipulate our MultiValue data with Word and Excel.”
But Wolsey’s strategy extended beyond migration and involved more cross platform and desktop integration with the main NT database server. jBASE was a breath of fresh air in this department, explained Forrett: “Communications between the previous system and off-the-shelf software was extremely clumsy. It required special routines to be written regularly, in order to transfer data between them, and even then the results were not very friendly for those using PC-based applications such as spreadsheets, databases and so on. Furthermore, the minicomputers involved high maintenance costs, and it made no sense to have to constantly manage two different environments.”
Being satisfied with the strategy, the challenge was making it a reality. Clearly, it made sense to convert the main applications to a more state-of-the-art environment, but the problem was that the applications running on the minicomputers represented hundreds - if not thousands - of man-years of programming effort, and it was vital for Wolsey that they were not lost.
“This was a big project for a company like Wolsey to implement,” continued Forrett, “as our systems are mission critical. If it went wrong, our business would quickly grind to a halt and more to the point, I would have been out of a job. However, jBASE Software appreciated this and set things up so that we could run tests over a few months. This meant we could become familiar with the product and see that it did precisely what we wanted.”
With jBASE Software’s assistance, when Wolsey made the switch to its new system - based on Windows NT with a twin-processor server supporting around 50 concurrent users - there were hardly any problems at all. Now, the new system acts as the computing base for all the company’s business activities, runs them an order of magnitude faster, offers far greater flexibility, and does it all at a fraction of the cost of the previous setup.
Forrett estimates that he has made annual savings tenfold over the previous system and this will be on an-ongoing basis. The savings have been invested into enhancing the IT arena and the benefits are already evident. “Also, we haven’t lost any investment, any data or performance - the traditional applications function as they did before. The users see the same menus, perform the same actions, so they are immediately familiar with everything, no end-user retraining at all has been needed. It’s almost miraculous!” exclaims Forrett.
There are a couple of clear examples of immediate business benefits. Take stock control: to automatically extract data from the legacy stock control package, and transfer it directly into an Excel spreadsheet is now extremely easy. There is no longer any need for custom programs to be operating within the Pick environment - all that’s needed is an embedded pointer within the spreadsheet. Another example is reporting. Previously, users frequently obtained and worked on databases, stock listings and so on by printing out vast reports - needed, according to Forrett, by the boxful. “A high speed line printer would run for five hours or more every Monday morning,” he said. “Now, because everything is on the same network, instead of printing onto to paper we can print to a file, and distribute the data to our staff’s desktop screens immediately.”
This is not only helping to save the world’s trees. It’s a major enhancement to productivity, as data is delivered in a timely fashion – and can be acted upon immediately. So the ways of using the data have been improved, providing Wolsey with competitive advantages to serve them well into the future.
Wolsey’s partnership with jBASE has already brought significant benefits for Wolsey. But the company is already planning future developments in several directions with jBASE at the core, including electronic data interchange (EDI), email, and the Internet. This is an area where Wolsey will be able to work with its customers to exploit the World Wide Web for direct trading and electronic commerce, as these become increasingly significant.
And what to the future? The technical decisions made today are the foundation for the way forward. Imagine, it is 2248. You may wonder what people will be wearing but you know it will be made by Wolsey.
jBASE Software LimitedLast Updated: 31 October 1998