CASE
STUDY

Did you know?
LANSA increased
Brunswick’s speed of
development by 30%! 

Did you know?
LANSA gave Brunswick
the ability to replace
their manual system
with a point-and-click
solution that worked
for every department
allowing Brunswick to
increase the speed
of their sales.

Keith Arteaga, Brunswick IT Manager, knew the VB6 application had to go. While his team were experts in developing for a specific operating system and technology stack, reaching beyond that stack into multi-UX development was presenting a skill and learning curve challenge. In addition, data silos were impacting the company’s ability to access operational information and manage sales opportunities in a timely manner. For example, before an opportunity became a contract it went through a lengthy validation process. This required users to retrieve information from multiple databases to perform a comprehensive credit analysis, evaluate payment history and assess past product sales. The sales team had to depend on office personnel and numerous manual steps to provide them with this information.

Arteaga’s vision was to replace the old application with a point and click web solution that could be hosted on the same system that drives their back-office processes. By doing so, his team could consolidate user interfaces and data access to bring all their business intelligence data into a single application and architecture. This would

access to quotes, credit approvals, contracts, freight shipments and payment schedules. Sales could much more easily track and manage their opportunities through every phase of the sales cycle. Customer expectations would be more accurately set and met.

The small, hardworking IT team strategized on which framework to build the new application. They were cognizant of their existing IT toolset and did not want to duplicate any functionality. And Arteaga knew that if they used an extended JavaScript (JS) IDE to build the application, back-end development was covered by one of his team members’ existing skills. What was missing, and what they would have to learn, is developing the front-end of the application. The team was up for the challenge, so they moved forward and purchased a cross platform, extended JS toolset.

“After two months into the project our team started to become concerned about manageability,” said Arteaga. “There were no boundaries in the development environment and the split environment was a dramatic departure from how we were used to developing for our ERP. We spent a lot of time jumping

Slipping behind schedule and concerned about sustainability, development in the split environment stopped. Arteaga turned his attention to finding an easier, long-term platform that would enable his team to collaborate, innovate and integrate with existing systems and databases from a single platform.

The LANSA low-code development platform was attractive to the team because it provided instant access to the architecture of a pre-built enterprise application. This meant the team could focus on business value and not have to learn so many new languages and separate frameworks.

In addition, the LANSA platform would expand the company’s access to data by integrating many systems across Brunswick’s diverse back-office data ecosystem within one development environment.

“With the help of online tutorials, documentation and a few calls to LANSA support, we got started with the LANSA platform quickly,” said Arteaga. “In a short amount of time, we built a lot of functionality that many other companies would not have taken on given the newness of the solution.”