3rdwave by Blinco Systems Inc.

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Components Promote Customization and Reuse
IBM DeveloperWorks, March 2001 - By Freelance Technology Journalist

After years of selling its supply chain management program 3rdwave® as a customized software package that was updated using standard version control procedures, Blinco Systems Inc. decided to componentize its product, making it easier to maintain and more easily adaptable to different customer requirements.

For the better part of the last decade, Blinco Systems sold its 3rdwave enterprise supply chain software as a customized, one-off solution specifically tailored to each client's unique requirements. 3rdwave was updated and maintained using a version control strategy, where new versions of the software were installed over existing versions.

"For each client, we would essentially start from scratch, recoding almost everything from the ground up," said Ned Blinick, vice president of Blinco Systems. "Eventually, we rejected that approach and moved to a component architecture," he said. "We realized that with component-based development (CBD), we would be able to use components that were already coded and modify them very quickly. We found the speed to development to be much, much quicker, and the ability to reuse the components is what made it happen. Now, we bring a prototype of our solution to the client so they can see what it looks like, and after we perform our requirements analysis, we start building their solution using components from our library."

Road to Components

3rdwave was initially developed using Informix 4GL tools more than 12 years ago. "Object-oriented and component approaches were in their infancy back then, but the product was still very modular in its design," Blinick recalls. "It was a natural for us to rewrite our Informix applications with the UNIFACE tool and develop objects we could reuse. We've been developing our component-based library ever since," he said. The move to components was driven internally by Blinco's business development and IT managers. "It just made sense to go that route," Blinick said. "It's offers huge opportunities and advantages," he said.

3rdwave's component library is hierarchical. "We knit small components, such as fields and data definitions, together to support larger components, such as records or tables, and then tie those together into modules that do the work," Blinick said. Using components, Blinco is able to modify its software to suit the precise business needs of their clients. "We cater to different industries, and what separates them is not necessarily the business processes, but the unique products they handle. The products have attributes that are very different from each other, but they also have many things that are similar, such as a description field or language field in the product record," he said. Using CBD, Blinco's developers can reuse components created for similar functions in different industries with a minimum of customization.

Targeted Solutions

Since Blinco Systems sells supply chain management solutions for companies involved in global product sourcing and distribution, the key issue facing their clients is the ability to gain visibility into the pipeline and know where their goods are at any time. While Blinco is a small, family-owned business with only 15 employees, many of Blinco's clients are quite large thanks to the company's strong background in global product sourcing and distribution. "Our customers have found that off-the-shelf packages often don't suit their business processes or give them the flexibility they need," Blinick said. "CBD helps us modify the software very quickly to a client's specific requirements, without requiring that they go through significant hardship to adapt to the software," he said.

After moving to a component approach, Blinco Systems found that its customers were no longer spending money on features they didn't need, and that they were reducing maintenance costs, as well. "Most customers who come to us still believe they want an off-the-shelf package," Blinick remarked. "What these customers don't realize is that once they hire someone to modify the code in an off-the-shelf package, it's no longer the same product. The cost of maintaining the package then goes up dramatically, and it becomes of question of who goes back into the program to customize it, and at what cost," he said.

However, if the vendor uses a CBD approach and the product is based on a set of modules that address the client's specific needs, it is much easier and much less expensive to maintain the software. "One of the real benefits of CBD is flexibility -- the ability to adapt the application to a changing business environment," Blinick said. "With version control, you don't have that flexibility -- you have to wait for the vendor to come up with a version that has what you need."

Say, “Hay”

One company to benefit from the Blinco Systems CBD approach is Honda Trading America, an affiliate of Honda Corp. that provides raw materials to manufacturing facilities and car parts to the automotive industry, and more. Honda Trading America uses 3rdwave for collaborative planning and forecasting, request for quotation management, inventory control, invoicing, and tracking purchase orders. As a testament to the diversity of today's corporate interests, Honda Trading America also has a division that exports foodstuffs and compressed hay to the Far East. "Thanks to CBD, we were able to integrate those divisions fully into the Honda Trading America operations while providing them with their own solutions, which are different from other divisions within the company," Blinick said.

Honda Trading America has been a Blinco Systems client for seven years, and Blinco is now moving them into component-based solutions to help streamline their accounting and financial processes. "What they had before (they became Blinco’s customers) were basically archaic accounting and spreadsheet packages," Blinick said. With 3rdwave, Honda Trading America was able to standardize and modularize their business processes, he said.

Honda Trading America handles a wide variety of goods, from various types of raw steel for manufacturing facilities, to aluminum for motor parts, as well as plastics, resins, food and electrical components. The foodstuffs are for human consumption, and the compressed hay is used for animal feed. "The different divisions within Honda Trading America have different requirements as to the way their products are handled, and different product records. But, ultimately, they all have to be standardized for the financial and accounting side of the business," Blinick said. Their products share characteristics such as customer records and ship-to addresses, which can be componentized. On a macro level, each division will have a component that defines the business of the division and the products they handle, and smaller components that contain unique information specific to each product.

"With CBD, we've been able to adapt a general product record to the specific requirements of each division. We can drop these components in and modify them very quickly to suit Honda's requirements," Blinick said. "As they add different divisions, we can use CBD to easily add capabilities," he said.

Resources
* Blinco Systems Inc.
* Honda Trading America
* IBM Supply Chain Management Solutions - Home Page
* EECOMS Project (Extended Enterprise COalition for Integrated Collaborative Manufacturing Systems)
* IBM MQSeries Business Process Management software

About the Author
Claude J. Bauer is a freelance technology journalist located in Middletown, MD. His work appears in numerous technology-oriented publications and on a variety of Web sites. Visit Mr. Bauer's home page or contact him at: claudebauer@claudebauer.com.