Schenker of Canada Tries Ajax

Accelerated Data Entry with Ajax and Nitobi

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Schenker is one of the world's leading providers of integrated logistics services with over 130 years of experience and 39,000 employees. Founded in 1872, Schenker has established over 1,100 offices in 13 countries around the world. They specialize in Ocean Freight, Air Freight, Land Transportation, and Customs Brokerage.

Challenge

Originally, with the online Schenker data management system, the data entry personnel at Schenker had to manually enter important operational data from Word and Excel documents into web forms one by one. Employees were wasting enormous amounts of time typing and saving rows of data individually.

These employees were used to using desktop tools like Excel, and management felt their web interface was slow and restrictive by comparison. The goal was to provide a more desktop-like interface that reduced the amount of wasted time and effort clicking and waiting for pages to load.

Solution

Schenker chose the Nitobi Grid Control V2 to recreate the tabular data editing capabilities of Excel in their web application. "The Grid has allowed us to create an 'Excel on the web' feel to the application." said Christian van Eeden, Application Specialist. They used the product to build streamlined data entry tools, and to leverage the time and bandwidth savings of AJAX technologies.

Audience

• 400+ Sales Users throughout Canada and the United States
• 100 additional data entry personnel throughout Canada, United States, and East Asia.

Technologies Used

• Nitobi Grid Control V2
• Nitobi Web ComboBox V3.15
• Multi-tiered server architecture
• Microsoft SQL server on the back-end with multi-gigabyte databases.
• Web Server - Zend Platform (PHP Middle Tier)

Project Details

Rich Internet applications are replacing traditional HTML architectures at Schenker. The developer wanted to leverage some more interactive AJAX behaviours to improve the company's system for storing, and tracking shipment pricing and information.

When a company the size of Schenker is designing data entry tools, one of the key considerations is streamlining workflow. The number of transactions entered each day are extremely high, and moderate time savings per transaction can add up to significant improvements in the productivity of the work force. "We needed to quickly enter customer data while reducing the need for page reloads." By using the Grid to edit records instead of the older web form technique used in the past, page reloads became unnecessary. Entry personnel could now search and make changes to data without ever reloading the page.

Before, users had to manually enter data from many Excel documents into standard web forms. Each record had to be entered individually, and the user had to wait for the page to refresh to know it had been saved. Now it became possible to simply copy and paste blocks of data from Excel to the web application by leveraging the Grid control's intelligent paste feature. Employees could seamlessly update blocks of data without ever having to wait for a page refresh, just as they would in Excel. This technology is made uniquely possible through the power of Ajax.

In addition, the grid empowered the developer to provide sophisticated data browsing capabilities. Users could 'freeze' columns to browse long records, and perform real-time sorting just as they would in Excel. What was even more helpful was the ability to embed 'shortcuts' in the product that would allow the user to populate other cells automatically depending on the contents of earlier cells.

Unlike Excel, the Grid allowed the developer to implement sophisticated validation and databound 'lookup' lists that could pull from live database data, making data entry more streamlined and controlled.

One of the challenges was creating an interface that could quickly manage large databases. By using Web ComboBox along side the Grid, users were now able to perform real-time searches of that database by client without waiting for the page to reload. Users could now type a portion of the customer name in the combobox, and the Grid would respond by showing the records for that customer. This resulted in a performance improvement on the earlier system, which took longer to perform the same tasks. The new interface allowed the user to easily search as they were typing. "We had been using JavaScript and XMLRPC for about three years now, but it was great to finally have some advanced tools that use all that AJAX has to offer", said the developer. "Our first rollout was on Monday, and I am getting some good feedback from users."

The developer was also optimistic about the future of the Grid in their web based systems. "Over the next year I will be deploying the grid to roughly 100 pages in our application, in various shapes and forms". Schenker is also planning to deploy their Grid and ComboBox based AJAX interfaces to their offices all over Europe. "I am really excited and looking forward to working more with it", he said.