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ExtranetWorks In Use... Logistics: Reusing Data to Detect Fraud and Fleet Maintenance Issues: XYZ Delivery Company XYZ Delivery and their customer, ABC Fleet Services represent actual ExtranetWorks Corporation clients, currently under non-disclosure. XYZ Delivery is a major, Fortune 500 shipping and logistics firm. The company name and quoted sources have been replaced with fictitious names. Problem You want to find a way to add value to the relationship with your customers while locking them into using your products. You have billing data sitting on hard drives that gets used once for invoice purposes. How do you turn all this data into something useful for your customers; information they never had access to before? Information must be easy to access, up-to-date, and presented to customers in a common presentation format. Customers must have access to fresh data—data published weekly or even daily. Integrating a new system with legacy systems and data is a challenge—especially data that is collected from all over the country, sorted, then consolidated for use by an individual client. Security would be needed to keep others out of data they should not see. Administration of passwords and security must be easy and centralized. Various portions of the program must be available only to the managers who need to see it. Application maintenance would be a problem if enough customers participated in the service. ABC Fleet Services could not deal with heavy support demands, let alone distributing software to many clients. The value of the service would increase as more features and reports are added, but enhancements are only possible if the application can be easily updated. ExtranetWorks Application Solution Find a way to provide XYZ Delivery with information about their fuel, oil and other fleet-related purchases throughout the region. Billing data from all over the country is sent via modems to ABC Fleet Services corporate office and stored on their MAS 90 accounting system. A report was designed to put new data into a file, then sent via FTP to ExtranetWorks web server. A program was developed to convert the raw data into a format that includes keys for sorting and filtering data. ExtranetWorks primary focus was on an Internet application that delivered the data to XYZ Delivery and other Fortune 500 firm’s management team through their web browser.
ExtranetWorks Java Application Broker handles the highly secure logon and sessions, and controls access to the data and application files. Only managers with higher security clearances can gain access to certain reports, application logic and data, such as information about only their own territory. Staff at XYZ Delivery use their web browser to log into the system and view data and reports. Several large corporations use ABC Fleet Services system, and their log-in ID determines which company the user is with and what set of data they are provided with. Depending on the user’s security level, they may be given district wide information, or information pertaining only to their employees. Based on criteria establish before printing reports, XYZ Delivery can zero in on data that is useful for management decisions and detecting fraud. Management reports include identification of fuel consumption by vehicle, credit card, and region. Fraud is detected with reports that show off-hour purchases and excessive purchases of either gallons of fuel, fuel types not used in a particular vehicle, and additional purchases, like oil and other maintenance items.
Information can be viewed by users by either browsing a list of data that matches their search criteria, viewing a report on screen which can be sent to the user’s printer, or by downloading data for use offline. ExtranetWorks Technology Solution At the heart of the fleet management application is the ExtranetWorks Java Application Broker program, or JAB for short. JAB acts like a traffic cop by first determining the security level of the user and locking them out if they don’t have authority to use the system and preventing access to reports for more senior management of XYZ Delivery. Though accessed through a normal web browser, such as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer or Netscape’s Navigator or Communicator, windows look nearly identical to any other application that runs on a local computer. JAB interprets what the user is trying to do and dynamically sends Java code to the browser and duplicates the look and feel of a stand-alone application. At the same time, JAB knows what data is needed to perform the business task and encapsulates everything into a single object that is sent to the user’s browser. Tremendous advantages of application broker technology include being able to change the logic and display of the application without having to redistribute the entire project to the field every time it changes. That means a new system can be up and running by simply changing the web page link on the Internet or Intranet server. Users are unaware of the change. Another advantage is that access to information is centrally controlled. If a user is no longer allowed to work on a business process or access data, access can be switched off immediately. Centralized management also means JAB can control access and bandwidth to legacy systems including databases. JAB can operate on a single stand-alone Windows NT server, or can interact with back-end systems, like UNIX, or databases, such as Oracle or Sybase.
As the demand for ABC Fleet Services increases, ExtranetWorks can also help manage large number of users accessing multiple JAB servers, using Scalable Session Manager (SSM). Summary With ExtranetWorks solutions, businesses can offer more information to their customers, and close the distance between organizations by integrating computer enterprises. The commitment with ExtranetWorks solutions is lower with projects that can be of smaller scope—matching the business processes. However the corporate computer system can grow to meet the demands and business challenges of the company. In fact, the ExtranetWorks Session Manager software allows Internet applications to scale to more than one server—preventing slow downs. ExtranetWorks can deliver the same functionality of high-end ERP and logistics systems at a fraction of the time and cost. If million dollar, multi-year development projects are not in your budget, let us show you how we can build a cost saving, revenue producing system for you—using your existing applications and data.
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