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Home ยป Morton Salt Keeps on Pouring with LANSA

Morton Salt Keeps on Pouring with LANSA

Over 20 years ago, Morton Salt, North Americaโ€™s leading producer and marketer of salt, successfully down-sized from an IBMยฎ 3090 mainframe to IBM i (then called AS/400). All re-development was done with LANSA. Today, Morton Salt is building further on its LANSA investment.

โ€œWe estimate that LANSA saved us at least 50% in development and maintenance,โ€ said Gayle MacCormick, Manager of Services and Operations at Morton Salt. โ€œOne of the reasons we achieved this productivity is because we use LANSA templates a lot. LANSA Templates make it so easy to generate programs with a consistent look and feel. We only needed to specify once how we want our screens to look and after that our standards are automatically applied.โ€

We estimate that LANSA saved us at least 50% in development and maintenance.

  1. The Challenge
  2. The Solution
  3. The Future
  4. Company and System Information

The Challenge

Downsizing from a mainframe

Up to 1995, Morton Salt, Corporate and Chemical were sharing an IBMยฎ 390 mainframe computer. In 1993 Morton Salt started a โ€˜Cycle Time Reduction teamโ€™ to establish the most efficient downsize plan. The downsize plan was to move each of the three divisions to their own AS/400. As part of the plan, this team was to investigate how to get systems to users quicker and what tools and procedures to use for this. Gayle was heading this team.

โ€œSeveral application development tools were investigated,โ€ explains Gayle. โ€œLANSA was selected because it offered a very complete functionality and it seemed easy to learn. We were especially attracted to LANSAโ€™s Repository-based architecture. LANSA is not just a code generator, its Repository offers much more.โ€

Morton Saltโ€™s 19 developers, all with a COBOL mainframe background, received a 10 day LANSA training course and were ready to start with the first project.

The Solution

The applications developed with LANSA

Gayle continues โ€œThe first application being written with LANSA was Order Entry. This was, in fact, one of the largest applications โ€“ not quite following LANSAโ€™s advice to start small. Order entry includes pricing, transportation and invoicing. But even though our first LANSA development project was very large, we managed quite well. The development and implementation was remarkably smooth.โ€

โ€œAfter that several other applications were written with LANSA, including maintenance management, production scheduling, inventory management and truck loading.โ€ explains Rick Pivek, Director of Information Services Morton Salt.

โ€œThe inventory system is real time. In the old mainframe days the inventory system was based on batch processing. The new inventory system processes transactions from the remote sites directly online. This process involves data queuing of transactions and transferring them back to the remote site.โ€

โ€œThe implementation of the AS/400 applications at our 33 remote sites went gradually.โ€ continues Rick. โ€œThe sites run a mixture of RPG, Cobol and LANSA applications. Eventually we may re-develop our existing Cobol and RPG applications with LANSA.

Rick, who only recently moved from Morton Corporate to Morton Salt, recalls โ€œAt corporate we developed a fairly complex Material Safety Data Sheets application with LANSA. This involved 125 physical files and 600 programs. This was done with only two people in one year. This could not have been done without LANSA.โ€

Morton Salt Products

Building further on the Repository

โ€œWe make extensive use of LANSA repository features,โ€ says Rick. โ€œWe simply love LANSAโ€™s repository approach. We have defined all our business rules and calculated fields in the repository. Our applications need to run in English and French and LANSAโ€™s multilingual facilities handle this superbly.โ€

โ€œCurrently we are in the process of implementing end-user reporting with LANSA Client. Without any additional effort we can re-use the calculated fields, business rules and English and French descriptions and help text. With LANSA we can leverage our investment strategy. LANSA Client offers the best of two worlds. A strong native AS/400 query and charting facility and a bundling with Crystal Reports โ€“ one of the best reporting tools.โ€

We simply love LANSAโ€™s repository approach.

The Future

Morton is currently looking at using LANSA in several new application areas including a winter salt stockpiling system which will feed real-time information on salt deliveries into a central order entry and inventory system to ensure salt gets where itโ€™s needed when winter storms hit.

Company and System Information

Morton Salt logo

  • Morton Salt, established in 1848, is the oldest group within Morton International. Other groups include Morton Chemical, Morton Electronic and Morton Corporate. All groups developed their systems with LANSA. Morton Salt has a product range of approximately 2000 products, such as salt for grocery, water-conditioning, ice control, agricultural, and industrial uses. These come in different versions (chemical content), sizes and packaging. Over 30 Morton Saltโ€™s sites use the solution, each site having between 10 and 50 users.
  • To read more about Morton Salt visit: www.mortonsalt.com