Case Study: Unisys at Antigua Sportswear
The Antigua Group of Scottsdale, Arizona, is one of America's fastest
growing sportswear suppliers. The company holds licensing agreements with
the Major League Baseball Association, the National Hockey League, the National
Basketball Association and the National Football League and Antigua garments
are the clothing of choice on Professional Golf Association tours.
Antigua needed to integrate the various technologies and databases of
the back-end systems that help run the company with the front-end systems
that run their web-site on the Internet. The key to doing this was to transform
corporate information into useful knowledge. As Antigua's Chris Devous stated:
"Knowledge is only valuable when you get it into the right hands at
the right time. If you're to remain competitive, your people on the front
lines must have accurate, timely information."
One example sited was that of a sales rep in Florida getting a call on
a Sunday afternoon from an anxious retailer wanting to know the whereabouts
of his order. The rep would have to put his customer off until Monday, then
call the Customer Service department, which is three hours behind Florida's
business day, to get an answer. Antigua wanted to be able to respond to
their customers quicker by getting at the right information quicker.
The answer to Antigua's problem was software developed using Unisys's
Cool ICE (Internet Commerce Enabler) by one of Unisys's Cool ICE partners,
Vector Technology. Unisys's Mark Van Reysen [Photo] explained, "Cool
ICE is a software integration solution that allows organisations to manage
a mixture of static and dynamic Internet applications on a corporate Intranet
or the public Internet. It ties the many varied parts of a heterogeneous
Internet commerce solution together into the common look and feel of the
World Wide Web." Put simply, Cool ICE allows users to access combinations
of static documents or dynamic application services through any standard
Web browser such as Netscape's Navigator or Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
The Cool ICE solution has enabled Antigua to achieve a major business
goal. It acts as a decision support tool by providing online, real-time
order status information to the 85 Antigua sales reps across the US. Now
instead of having to put off a customer enquiry until the next day, the
sales rep in Florida can put his caller on hold while he connects into the
Antigua website and, using the customer order number, can send a query into
the main business system. The software will pull the relevant data out and
interface it directly on to a formatted HTML Web page that is made available
almost immediately. The progress of an order can also be monitored by calling
in with the same query at various times and watching the status change.
Obviously any solution that Antigua put in place had to be secure to
prevent unwanted accesses to their business systems from Joe Public. Cool
ICE maintains a secure environment by having users sign on with an ID and
password. Not all corporate data is made available on the Web; only specifically
designated data with specific availability rules is available to casual
enquirers.
Automatically generated session numbers are embedded in all output and
hyperlinks sent from the server to the client once the client has been verified
as a valid user. Each time a hyperlink is followed, the session number is
returned to the Cool ICE server. This enables Cool ICE to keep track of
the user and does away with the need for an ID and password to be input
for each screen. The combination of the extensive security features provided
within the Cool ICE environment and the security that is provided by the
commercial Web server software creates an effective firewall to Internet
business applications for corporate data.
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