Tavilo and Morgan Corporation create
Morgan Information Gateway

Morgan Corporation is the nation's foremost truck body manufacturer. Founded in 1952 in Morgantown, Pennsylvania, Morgan is the country's largest manufacturer of Class 3 to 7 dry freight and refrigerated truck bodies and the market share leader. Tavilo Incorporated, provider of Real Time Business Intelligence and Performance Management software solutions for the manufacturing industry, worked with Morgan to roll out an enterprise-wide information portal based on data residing on an IBM iSeries system (System i). They used HiT Software's Ritmo for iSeries .NET Data Provider to access corporate data.

Reviewers
 
Michael Gilbert, president of Tavilo Incorporated, worked closely with Morgan's project management team to identify requirements, develop an implementation plan and then deliver the solution.
 
Dean Heffentrager, Project Leader at Morgan Corporation, was responsible for the MIG (Morgan Information Gateway) project and worked very closely with Tavilo to assure a timely and successful implementation.

Background
 
Morgan Corporation was facing an enterprise-wide issue of providing access to critical information. Each department had their own set of data needs and the goal was to create an application that provided an answer to data needs across the enterprise. Tavilo worked with Morgan to provide a branded website called the Morgan Information Gateway (MIG). The MIG is the enterprise information portal that allows all Morgan employees to view information that is critical to the performance of their daily business activities.

Platforms
 
Using .NET 2.0 and Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Tavilo built an application using Tavilo Gateway 2.0 and HiT Software Ritmo for iSeries to access enterprise data residing on an IBM iSeries (System i), V5R3M0.

Problem Solved
 
Morgan was facing a corporate-wide problem of gaining access to disparate real time data and turning that data into meaningful information. They wanted to provide:

• Access to company forms, documents and other general information for use by all Morgan employees,
• The ability for sales staff to search for order, quoting, and pricing information,
• Access to Key Performance Indicator (KPI) based dashboards in highly graphical format for executives and operations manager decision making,
• The ability to drill down in order to view the underlying detail information behind a chart or report,
• Hyperlinked information for easy navigation.

Selection Criteria
 
Tavilo based their iSeries connectivity tool selection on 3 essential factors:

1. Architecture
2. Speed
3. Price

Product Functionality
 
Ritmo gave Tavilo the one feature they really needed: extremely fast read only access to iSeries data stored in DB2. With Ritmo, they did not need to worry about iSeries specific data conversion issues, connectivity issues, or SQL issues. Tavilo's Michael Gilbert added "It worked right out of the box and was simple for us to OEM."
 

Strengths
 
For Tavilo, the most important features of Ritmo were the architecture and performance. They had to have a pure .NET middleware solution. Trying to work with COM-based product would have been problematic. Their product depends on displaying information to users in the fastest possible manner. Ritmo was able to meet that need.
 

Vendor Support
 
Michael Gilbert reports that Ritmo was a very easy product to implement. The object model is very similar to other .NET data providers so it was very easy to learn.
 
Tavilo has had very little need for technical support from HiT. The products typically work as designed, and problems have been easily solved with a simple configuration change.
 
Best in class manufacturers like Morgan understand that accessible, timely and accurate information can often become a company's, most important competitive advantage. The combination of the Tavilo solution with the Hit Ritmo product provides that advantage.
 
HiT Software, Inc. can be reached at: www.hitsw.com.
 
Tavilo Incorporated can be reached at: www.tavilo.com.