HBC - Holdings & Barnes

The Company

Established in 1959, and with a head office in Canvey Island, Essex, HBC (Holding & Barnes) Plc. are the second largest vehicle salvage company in the UK, collecting and storing written off vehicles for a number of major motor insurance companies.

They collect an average of 40,000 units per year ranging from mopeds to HGVs - including the occasional combine harvester! HBC store these vehicles until each claim has been settled and hold weekly auctions at each of their 3 sites across the UK.

In order to cope with the logistics involved in this process, HBC has been using DataEase for 15 years to handle some of their key business processes.

The Challenge

Back in 1992, Geoff Riebold, (now HBC's IT Director), developed an application in DataEase DOS to replace their previously paper based system. Over the years Geoff has been responsible for introducing many features and improvements to the original application, including direct html report output to their corporate website, remote access by insurance companies and networking 55 (including remote) users either at Head office or remotely using Citrix Presentation Server. This database now holds over 700,000 records containing the details of the vehicles HBC have been instructed to collect since the system's inception.

Handling up to 500 vehicles a day HBC has been experiencing an increasing demand on their resources to deal with telephone enquiries from their client insurance companies. Each client needs to check, on a daily basis, the current status of their vehicles, whether they are waiting for collection, have been collected, are in storage or been sold.

This drove Geoff to investigate ways to make a "live" copy of HBC's database available online to their clients. Having looked at deploying parts of the application via Citrix he concluded that something more flexible was required. Geoff adds: "The maintenance involved in providing access to a database via Citrix is quite high as a session needs to be created for each individual user, plus user names and passwords and I was really looking for a system where each client would be in control of their own usage."

Solution

When Sapphire demonstrated WebPublisher to HBC Geoff saw this as a great opportunity. He continues; "We are running one of the largest and most complex DataEase DOS 5 applications around (500 forms, 1,500 procedures) and a migration to DataEase 6 is a process which cannot be done overnight. WebPublisher has given us a chance to deploy our data "live" now with a Windows interface until such a time we can convert to Windows." Sapphire was contracted for 4 days to install and publish a pilot form of HBC's live database on their website.

In just half a day Sapphire installed and published HBC's Tracking System Form online for testing. Geoff comments: "The speed at which WebPublisher was installed and our tracking form was published was amazing. In half a day we managed to achieve the solution I had been searching for months. We still had to refine the published form adding our logo, etc. but at the end of that week we had our pilot form ready for user acceptance testing by a number of insurance companies."

According to Sapphire, "We were able to use the customisation flexibility of WebPublisher 2 to publish HBC's form very quickly as it brings across not only any buttons you have in your DataEase 6 form but also reflects filters and field derivations. It is also server based, meaning users browsing or searching through the 700,000 records available on that particular form have immediate feedback as if they were sitting at HBC's office. And with its ability to publish reports, import and export data to file, and include multiline subforms, WebPublisher 2 clearly offered the solution HBC required."

The outcome

"WebPublisher has given us a way forward", says Geoff, "Before, we were just looking at a brick wall and were even looking at alternatives to DataEase or moving to SQL. It has enabled us to satisfy our customers, whilst gradually decreasing the pressure on our resources."

Sapphire is now starting development of Phase 2, giving full access to insurance companies and publishing other areas of HBC's application such as key QBM reports. Geoff is also considering deploying parts of his application to engineers via PDA's. He finalises: "We will then migrate our call centre users, Accounts users, and finally remote site users to DataEase 6. At this rate we will be able to discard DOS within the next 18 months".