Uline

Uline, a shipping supply distributor with offices in Chicago, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and  Newark, has been using Directions as their order fulfillment software for over ten years. 

Dealing mostly in business to business orders, Uline depends on data from Dun & Bradstreet (DNB) to verify a new customer's credit rating.  They also use  the data provided by DNB to market to potential and existing customers.

When DNB began dropping support for their legacy systems, they offered to sell Uline their CAM-Online system. However, this new system lacked the ability to  tie directly into their existing order fulfillment system.  Uline wanted  an operator to be able to connect to DNB for a credit lookup without exiting their own system. This connection had to be seamless.

To fulfill these requirements a series of Java programs were  written to connect to DNB's CORBA server manager.  Using this design, the Java programs running on Uline's AS/400 would make calls to DNB's databases via a TCP/IP connection.  The Java programs were then  able to write their results directly to the Directions databases on the AS/400.  This design eliminated the need for Uline to purchase the CAM-Online product and it also  eliminated the need for the operators to learn a new application.  In addition, by not forcing their operators to open a different application to obtain credit ratings, Uline was able to process new customers much more quickly.