Owens & Minor's Guzman, for example, had no desire to go through anERP implementation. "ERPERP projects take too long, they generally don'tturn out well, and they cost too much," he says. But something neededto be done with the cumbersome, multilayered, 15-year-old applicationsthat contained the contracts and pricing systems for the company. Toupgrade, Guzman couldn't go to the originalvendor - KnowledgeWare - because it was out of business. And Owens &Minor's heavily customized applications ran OS/2, which IBM no longersupports. Alles zu ERP auf CIO.de

"Legacy applications are a cancerous problem that needs to beexcised," Guzman says dramatically. "It's not a choice. If yourbusiness is changing, your systems have to change. We needed theability to do things like multicurrency transactions over the Web, andthe old system was completely inflexible."

Still, the old contracts and pricing system contained extremelycomplex business rules and mathematical computations that were vitalto Owens & Minor's dynamic pricing methods. The legacy system set aseparate, unique price for every product for every single Owens &Minor client, taking into account literally dozens of factors. Guzmandidn't even want to think about losing that functionality. So he tooka gamble on a tool by Relativity Technologies that promised to uncoverthe vital business processes buried in the old system, turn them intoWeb-ready components and translate the Cobol and CICS intoJava.

Guzman tested the tool on three master files containing EDI maps andcustomer information. Within six months, the test project wascomplete.

"It easily would have taken us years to modernize via hand-coding," hesays. "And it easily would have cost us tens of millions of dollars togo with SAPSAP or OracleOracle. So far we've spent about $1 million on thisproject." Alles zu Oracle auf CIO.de Alles zu SAP auf CIO.de