Scenario 3

BigStore is a large store with branches in several locations. Because they guarantee that their advertised merchandise is always available, an accurate inventory is essential. They want to move to a "just-in-time" approach to inventory control to improve efficiency and reduce waste.

Technology Issues

The sales personnel use handheld devices to determine prices and total customer purchases, and transfer the data to point-of-sale devices. A cashier then handles the sales transaction, and separates the inventory control tickets. The tickets are sent to the data processing department daily, delaying the update of the inventory data, which is stored in a proprietary database. Data from the point-of-sale devices goes to an Oracle database to generate daily sales totals.

Environment

The sales force uses Java-based handheld devices, which beam data to the point-of-sale devices. It uses commercial software, as well as systems developed internally with PowerBuilder. Inventory is monitored in a proprietary ODBC 3.0-compliant database.

SequeLink® Solution

Because the point-of-sale devices are Java-based, the solution requires the SequeLink Client for JDBC as shown in Figure 2-3.

Figure 2-3. Scenario 3

The point-of-sale devices connect through Websphere and the SequeLink Client for JDBC to two different SequeLink servers.

In this scenario, you install the SequeLink Client for JDBC on the IBM WebSphere application server and SequeLink Server for ODBC Socket on the server for the proprietary database.