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