The current process for Volvo Trucks involves a series of faxes and phone calls and provide no avenue for customers to directly access the order information they need. It is also labor intensive, because orders have to be manually processed into the mainframe at the corporate office. Currently about 85 to 90 percent of Volvo Trucks' applications are stored on legacy hosts with data stored in DB2 and other databases. For fleet customers, this meant details on the status of their orders could only be accessed through their account representative. For Volvo Trucks, this meant that many tasks were done manually that should have been automated.
Customers can also access order status details at any time.
This reduces processing time and costs, and speeds payment. This implementation also provides new opportunities for Volvo Trucks. For example, the Order Validation System, used by the company's sales engineers, takes advantage of OLE DB Provider for DB2 to create web reports of discrepancies between order specs and available vehicle configurations. Eastridge Technology consultant Scott Anderson created this Web-based application to read the DB2 table and instantly generate a report of order errors. Previously this was handled in a batch process, so each time the engineers needed a report of order errors they had to rerun the batch process.