Databorough: MAPICS Finds the Answer with X-Analysis-Feedback from Satisfied X-Analysis Users (Advertorial)

MAPICS has always prided itself upon searching out the best tools to help streamline the process of designing, creating, testing, documenting and delivering some of the finest applications in the ERP software market. Over the past few years the company has outsourced some product development and support areas. It was important for MAPICS to have a consistent, fast and flexible tool that can be used by everyone within its organization and by the company's outsourcing partner.

With more than 50 million lines of code and several releases of that code being enhanced and supported, and with the need to attach several of the affiliates packages at one time, these demands were pretty hard to meet.

MAPICS has been around since the days of System/34, System/36* and System/38* systems, has code written in every version of RPG released and large applications based in the Synon development environment. Given that, and the move to outsourcing, the company needed something to help cover that knowledge gap quickly and easily.

Solution

"Within an hour of being introduced to the product, we have had new users, with very little knowledge of an application, create and drill down from a full application data model diagram into a data flow diagram to view every program that touches a selected file. They can jump from the data flow diagram directly down to the actual source code view and investigate the code," says Mark Rinker, Solutions Architect, iSeries*, MAPICS. "One of the best features we've found is, within seconds, the product can give you the exact business rules that are being executed within a program viewed as pseudo code."

The tool also allows different departments to tackle problems from different angles based on the knowledge that they have at the time. "In our support group an end-user may call and say, I have a problem within this specific program and want to know how this data is being validated. Now a support person can drill from the information given into the exact program that is in question, have X-Analysis derive the business rules, mark and send them to the Documenter, which produces a very nice report that can be e-mailed directly to the end user. What before would have taken several hours of investigation can now be done in minutes," says Rinker.

He adds: "The product is just head and shoulders above their competition, plain and simple."

Databorough

Neil Woodhams

92 Caplan Ave.

Barrie, Ontario

L4N 0Z7  Canada

(705) 719-7912

info@databorough.com

www.databorough.com

Product Details

X-Analysis

Supported platforms: iSeries* systems