When the largest termite and pest control company in the world wanted to grow its business opportunities, it looked to LANSA for assistance. A long-time LANSA customer, Terminix was one of the first companies to implement the company's latest software offering, LANSA Composer, to expand its EDI capabilities.
Terminix had been negotiating with third party partners to offer home owners a solution where the Terminix payment would become part of the partners' customer remittance process. Bruce Baxter, software engineer of infrastructure at Terminix, said, "Essentially, this would be a background EDI effort with multiple transmissions occurring for each new customer. These partners will include an insert advertising Terminix services with their monthly statements. When a home owner opts for the service, we set up a new order in our legacy system."
Terminix uses an i5 model 595 that will gather these new orders once a day and feed them into LANSA Composer, which maps the DB2 records into a text file and FTPs the document to the partner company. The company later returns a text file verifying that the order is valid. LANSA Composer retrieves this text file via FTP, maps the data to a DB2 file and a legacy program processes the data accordingly. The company sets up its system to add the Terminix fees to the monthly statements, collects these fees and remits the monies to Terminix, then sends a text file with the remittance information. LANSA Composer picks up this new text file, maps the data to a DB2 file and a legacy program updates A/R with these cash receipts.
Baxter explained the system's ease of use: "We had to create only one set of legacy programs to handle the data processing for all the companies. To set up additional companies, only the unique information for that new company (trading partner) needs to be defined to LANSA Composer. In our process flow, LANSA Composer is a ‘black box' that layers our legacy application away from the tedious EDI details."
Baxter also commented on the simplicity of the LANSA Composer tutorials: "Once we installed LANSA Composer and completed the tutorials, which are very good, I was able to set up a test environment and complete a cycle just by going through them. It was a painless effort." In fact, Terminix was able to get LANSA Composer working with its legacy system without any training from LANSA.
He continued, "LANSA Composer is easy to use, easy to learn and very intuitive, especially the mapping and transformation part as it's all GUI. For us, LANSA Composer has filled a need."
Steve Gapp, president of LANSA Americas, said, "LANSA Composer brings a new dimension to the family of LANSA solutions - a business process integration product that allows for process orchestration and the transformation of data from our customers' trading partners. What is more exciting is that the solution can be installed and configured very quickly with no programming skills required. It is great to see how quickly LANSA Composer can be harnessed to deliver real business benefit and a rapid return on investment."
About Terminix
Terminix is an industry leader in termite and pest control services. Headquartered in Memphis, Tenn., Terminix employs 12,000 associates across 450 service centers and serves more than 3 million customers in 45 states. Terminix provides pest control service for termites, rodents and other pests. To learn more about Terminix, visit their Web site at www.terminix.com or call 1-800-TERMINIX.
About LANSA
LANSA is a leading provider of application development, modernization and integration software. LANSA's suite of cross-platform development tools lets organizations overcome the complexity inherent in creating and maintaining business applications. LANSA's integrated tool set is also the technology foundation for a wide range of business solutions from LANSA and over 300 Business Partners. Established in 1987, LANSA supports thousands of companies around the world with its products and services. For more information, visit: http://www.lansa.com/.
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