Healthcare/InsuranceMcKesson CorporationContact: Tools Used: McKesson, founded in 1833, provides health care products and services to retail pharmacies, hospitals and health care networks. In the healthcare field, time is of the essence. Customers want to know the status of their orders immediately. Customers want customized inventory statements immediately. Your sales force wants product use reports and inventory level reports immediately. Effectively managing this vast distribution network requires accurately tracking thousands of products sold across dozens of territories. In the past, generating a customized report for one of its customers could be slowed by a tremendous backlog of requests.
Solution: InfoLink enables hundreds of concurrent users to view customized HTML pages within browsers running at any location and on any platform. Greatly diminishing the need for customized sales and inventory reports, InfoLink reduces the wait for this information from up to weeks to a matter of seconds. With the arrival of InfoLink McKesson's sales staff can review pricing, inventory and monthly or annual totals from any location where they can get their laptops up on the 'Net. Likewise, McKesson customers, pharmacies, chain stores, to hospitals to nationwide health networks, will be able to simply open a browser, key in a password and review the current status of their business with McKesson, down to the invoice level. "We set out to provide, in a controlled and economical way, an efficient means of giving sales representatives, pharmacies and distributors alike an abundance of information as quickly as possible," says Michael Keselman, senior systems programmer at McKesson. "With InfoLink, we make optimal use of the information in our data warehouse. It delivers comprehensive historical data that includes much more current information than was previously provided. It also delivers analytical tools that enable both McKesson and its customers to analyze site or system purchasing patterns in order to enhance business efficiency." InfoLink delivers a dramatic improvement in the speed of information access. "Previously, the legacy applications we were using made generating customized reports a very slow process," explains Keselman. "It frequently took weeks to generate a single report for, say, one month's activity for a particular customer or district or territory. Now we can deliver that same information in four seconds. The return on the investment will be off the charts. Plus, we expect to increase the effectiveness of our sales reps and enable them to build stronger partnerships with their customers." How the System Works:McKesson's Web Development Team worked with Broadway Technologies Group, a San Francisco-based consulting organization, to build and implement this distributed-object application. The system consists of multiple components. Its front-end server resides at the company's San Francisco headquarters. The system's back-end sits some 100 miles away, at McKesson's nationwide Drohan Data Center in Sacramento, where another server runs the database connectivity software that links the company's Web server to an enormous data warehouse. The Web server receives clients' HTML requests, inserts them into serialized Java objects, and passes the request, object and all, via IIOP to the server attached to the data warehouse. Once received, objects are filled with the required information and sent back to the Web server. The application then generates standard HTML pages that are sent back to the clients' browsers. Since the responses to the clients are simply HTML, the application supports any browser and allows very thin clients. Inprise’s VisiBroker for Java ORB provides the infrastructure for transporting the Java objects from one server to another. These VisiBroker-based Java objects use the Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP) for high-performance communication through the company's firewalls. "Until now, we haven't had a consistent means of moving data," says Keselman. "There are three disparate networks, and they're all surrounded by multiple firewalls. The ORB transport mechanism ensures security and performance." "The VisiBroker technology enabled us to efficiently organize and design a distributed, object-oriented system that met the demands of rapid application development," says Deborah Todd, McKesson's Web Applications Development manager. "It's based on open industry standards, which helped in integrating existing technology and reduced the risk of adopting the new technology." In the McKesson object model, nearly 100 Java objects serve roles ranging from HTML page formatting and Java code generation to transporting the data from server to server. The objects based on VisiBroker for Java are registered to ensure that they are ready at all times to handle information requests. VisiBroker's Smart Agent architecture delivers system availability and scalability. The VisiBroker Smart Agents balance the system work load by routing requests to the first available server. Multiple instances of the VisiBroker-based transport objects are running at all times to ensure that this communication channel remains up. "The VisiBroker for Java ORB delivers the performance required to provide reliable, business- critical data access to the thousands of McKesson clients that will use InfoLink," says R.J. Pittman, founder of Broadway Technologies and lead architect for the project. "It gave us an open, flexible, standards-based communications infrastructure with which to transport data and data requests from the Web server to the data warehouse." "One of the greatest challenges in building this application was to deliver a state-of-the-art system to the business without demanding advanced end-user requirements and system knowledge," says Pittman. "This achievement enabled McKesson to deliver a very powerful system to the end-users with minimal training, no deployment costs, and no incremental or special hardware or software requirements whatsoever. This significantly reduced the cost of ownership to both McKesson and its customers. This is the future...today." The new application architecture and communications infrastructure also promise a bright IT future at. "With InfoLink, we have built a standard technology infrastructure for all McKesson services," says Chuck Nettles, McKesson's director of technology. "Our object model is very robust so that when we add a new application we can drop it right into a foundation that includes the CORBA-based communications infrastructure. Our application development cycles will be shortened." |