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GeneXus and SAP Integration at LAN Chile

Lan Chile chose GeneXus 8.0 for developing systems to satisfy the company's required functionalities that weren't taken into account in SAP modules, and developed its own middleware.

Lan Chile, an airline that bills US$ 2,000,000,000 per year and has 11,500 employees, was getting ready to implement SAP in the holding, but it had to solve a set of tool functionalities that didn't adjust to the company's needs, or that weren't included in the platform's standard tools.

"The basic problem consisted in finding a strategy that allowed adding or modifying those requirements at the lowest cost possible, without having to depend on outside consulting agencies or providers, and minimizing ABA/4 developments," explains Álvaro Gómez Rubio, Lan Chile's Project Manager.

For this reason, the company chose GeneXus 8.0 (Java generator), a tool that "has allowed to create a new production line at a relatively low cost and with a very high response capacity, in comparison to traditional developments associated to SAP. In this way, solutions have been developed for Human Resources, Internal Communication, Processes, WorkFlow, etc.," pointed out Gómez Rubio.

In relation to the connectivity between SAP and GeneXus, different alternatives were considered, until making the decision to develop its Own Middleware. "The development is called "Listener" and receives requests for execution from RFC through an XML file (via SOAP), it parses the parameters according to the service's definition, connects with the specific server and executes the RFC. After the parsing, it returns XML with the result of the execution," explains in detail Gómez Rubio.

To develop the client's tier, a tool was developed with GeneXus to allow generating the XMLs associated to each service to carry out the testing. With these files, one can develop the client programs (Web) that call the Java classes and process the results of the calls.

Besides, Gómez highlighted that the combination of the middleware with the prototype development has been very successful within the company, since they have been able to simultaneously develop additional front tools to the rollouts at a marginal cost.

http://www.lanchile.com

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