At Hendriksen & Søn a/s IceBreak is used to merge IBM i™ data with Microsoft Office and produce individualized quotations

Individual quotations for individual solutions is the key concept at Hendriksen & Søn a/s. With a production of more than 500,000 catalogs, magazines and books per day, it has proven difficult to balance between individualization and uniform mass production. Quotes written in Aspect/4 have a tendency to look like “pick lists”, which can be tiresome reading for the customer.

Throughout the past many years, Hendriksen & Søn and its associated company, Dipak, have been leading within production, packing, and distribution of books and magazines. Their position in the market has been maintained due to a strong business concept in combination with good customer service and production based on the newest technology. Both companies use Aspect/4 on a shared IBM i™ server. The individual customer cases are created within Aspect/4 as offers, which, after they have been accepted, become orders and production papers. Some customer cases become standing orders, which are executed with set intervals. All orders become invoices in the accounting department.

The key to success is individual offers for customer-specific solutions

“Our success is based on the ability to make customer-specific solutions at good prices”, says Managing Director Jan Bach. However, it has always been difficult to individualize the offers in Aspect/4 so that customers receive written order confirmation, stating all requirements and specifications. It has always been difficult to balance individualization with uniform mass production.

The solutions was simple with IceBreak

In order to meet the ever-increasing requirements for individualized offers, Hendriksen & Søn, together with Dipak, decided to find a permanent solution to the problem. Using IceBreak, data from IBM i™ is merged with Microsoft Office. After the offer is entered in Aspect/4, IceBreak opens a Word document. The Word document presents the data in a new, better-structured way, and the person making the offer can customize the document to the specific solution and include the “soft” service items, which cannot be included in Aspect/4.

IceBreak can also be used in the traditional 5250 environment

By a simple menu selection, IceBreak jumps from the traditional 5250 terminalsession directly into Windows and starts Microsoft7 Word. The control functions in Aspect/4 follow through IceBreak and ensure that the correct address is added to the document. The person making the offer decides in advance whether a color logo should be included, for example, if the document is to be sent by fax or e-mail and not printed on preprinted paper. Within a few seconds, IceBreak formats and sets up the offer – but before the person making the offer is allowed to continue, IceBreak saves the document, using the offer number as a unique name. This way an offer can always be found again, even after Word has been exited..

Two platforms meet – in one program

In one program only, IceBreak collects the order from Aspect/4 using the programming language RPG, and merges the database fields from the order with a text template using VB-Script – which is the macro language in Microsoft Office. Using the same method, IceBreak can create Excel™ spreadsheets, including calculations and graphs. All functions in Microsoft Office that can be called from VB-Script are supported by IceBreak. In the same manner, IceBreak can provide access to Oracle and Access databases, using SQL, directly from RPG and COBOL programs.