By Peet Rapp, Sr. Market Research Analyst; and Mary Langen, Marketing Projects Leader

In a rapidly evolving world economy, U.S. textile manufacturers must be efficient and highly responsive to customer needs in order to remain competitive. From this perspective, Blumenthal Print Works, an 80-year-old, privately held firm that produces printed and specialty Jacquard fabrics for bedding and furniture manufacturers, is at the forefront of its industry.

"We need to provide [customers] the right products at the right prices. We are a make-to-order operation," says Ted Baer, Blumenthal Print Works' Executive Vice President of IT.

Blumenthal's customers expect quick delivery and excellent quality. To ensure continued success, it is essential for the company to provide near-real-time, actionable information to its employees so they can promptly respond to customer requests. Blumenthal's agility is made possible in part by the near-total integration of its operational IT infrastructure, and the company's dedication to continuous improvement of these systems. Blumenthal has developed into a fully integrated enterprise, with production, sales, supply chain, and accounting systems running on two IBM iSeries Model 810 computers. Before 2003, the company used a homegrown software change management solution. However, with more sophisticated Web-enabled iSeries applications looming on the horizon and downtime becoming increasingly unacceptable, the need for best-of-breed iSeries software change management became apparent.

The iSeries processes real-time inventory and production data, monitors the company's looms, and handles planning, order entry, product design, and finance/accounting applications.

After researching iSeries change management solutions, Blumenthal Print Works determined that SoftLanding's TurnOver provides an efficient iSeries software development framework that also addresses requirements that the company envisions in the future. TurnOver's application promotion process – from application development, to test, to production – is essential to maintaining the company's operational integrity, and the use of TurnOver is key to Blumenthal Print Works' continuous improvement charter.

iSeries at Work

Blumenthal's production facilities are located in Marion, South Carolina, with corporate offices in New Orleans. It has an iSeries Model 810 computer at its Marion factory, with a hot backup and development system (also a Model 810) located in New Orleans. The Marion iSeries computer processes real-time data from Blumenthal's automated data collection system, which uses both hard-wired and wireless bar code scanners to track yarn inventory, work-in-process, and finished goods. It also monitors the operation of the company's looms and handles planning, order entry, product design, and finance/accounting applications. In addition to serving as a mirrored backup system and application development platform, the New Orleans-based system hosts the company's Web site.

Blumenthal makes an average of 30 application changes a week on the development box and then distributes these changes via FTP to the production box using TurnOver.

"We have had a few situations where we had to use TurnOver's recovery function to back out system changes. It worked very well. Before we had TurnOver, we performed this function manually, and it was very error prone depending on the magnitude of the change," says David Bourgeois, Manager of Systems Development and Programming.

During Blumenthal's initial weeks of TurnOver use, SoftLanding's technical support helped Blumenthal get up to speed. "We love them; give them 110%!" David remarked.

After nine months of use, David says that TurnOver is what they expected, and more. "It just makes sense. The object change history tracking function within TurnOver has been very beneficial in tracking system changes," he says.

Blumenthal uses TurnOver to manage an average of 30 application changes a week.

Now that Blumenthal has used TurnOver for a while, the company particularly appreciates how the system automatically recreates all programs that a file uses whenever the file changes. They also like TurnOver's ability to set up a worklist for a project to group and move all objects related to a system change.

"Since migrating our development efforts to WebSphere and the Eclipse environment, the TurnOver plug-in has made system changes much easier to track," says David. "Having the Eclipse plug-in has reduced the need to use any green screen application for development changes. When making file changes, having TurnOver automatically check the cross reference and recompile all necessary programs has been a tremendous time saver."

Planning for the Future

To sustain its agility, Blumenthal Print Works intends to continue its operational improvement process. It plans to replace its green screen user interfaces with user-friendly GUIs that provide more concise, easier-to-read information for its 250 operations associates. It is also looking to improve its Web site and offer improved real-time order status information for customers with password-protected online access. Blumenthal is confident that TurnOver will efficiently manage all of its green screen-to-Web-enabled application updates in a consistently intuitive manner.

Blumenthal Print Works plans to support additional B2B e-Commerce initiatives when the time is right. Though the majority of its customers currently prefer a traditional hard copy purchase order, when customer demand for electronic enterprise-to-enterprise transactions rises, Blumenthal Print Works will be ready.

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