Sutton Tools replaces legacy systems to improve operations and customer service

Topic

Legacy system replacement


Industry

Mechanical and Industrial Engineering

Key points

Sutton Tools needed to build a new application to replace its existing legacy systems

Building Master-Detail-Detail views easily was a key criteria in choosing the new RAD tool

FOEX’s functionality helped extend the application's scope to manage RESTful services as well

The Customer

Sutton Tools is a 100% Australian family owned business which specializes in manufacturing quality cutting tools and accessories.

The company employs over 400 people in Australia and New Zealand and manages over 20,000 line items that get distributed globally, servicing the Tool & Die, Aerospace, Automotive and General Engineering industries, as well as trade and DIY.

The Challenge

For their day-to-day operations Sutton Tools’ marketing & sales department relied on a combination of tools including reports from their ERP system and Excel spreadsheets, to manage catalogue data and specific customer enquiries. Essentially, the same type of information is now also available on Sutton Tools’ website and the built-in Expert Tool Selector (ETS) which enables users to easily select the right cutting tools based on their intended use, type of material, level of performance and other cutting parameters.

To maintain their competitive advantage and quality of service for its customers, Sutton Tools realized that a new solution was needed in order to replace the existing combination of reports and Excel spreadsheets. The new software had to consider additional variables such as the user’s geographical location - as different products are being sold in different regions, product images, catalog language and new information such as each product’s features and benefits.

Given the application’s growing complexity, another factor taken into account in the decision making process was the ease through which the new system could be maintained by the company’s small IT department. Therefore, the development team was tasked with finding a flexible and easy-to-use RAD tool which the company could rely on to develop its internal systems moving forward.

FOEX Success Stories: Sutton Tools

The Solution

Moving to the evaluation phase, a couple of Java-based frameworks (such as Grails and Vaadin) were taken into consideration, but due to time and resource constraints, they were quickly discarded.

Next, Oracle Application Express (APEX) was evaluated as a potential solution. The team noticed that while Oracle APEX was satisfying their requirements in terms of presenting the data, it still had some limitations they had to overcome when setting up the Master–Detail–Detail views they needed. In the search of a tool that would complement APEX’s standard functionality, Sutton Tools learned about the FOEX Plugin Framework while attending Oracle OpenWorld.

After a quick online research about the company and its solution, the team signed up for a free trial to test the framework’s capabilities. Using the FOEX Desktop Demo as a starting point they were able to quickly build a sample product management application with information-dense pages which include the relevant details that their marketing team needed, all in one screen.

Furthermore, the development team noticed that FOEX enabled them to build complex pages which presented compacted amounts of data in a table format and facilitated an easy setup for creating the Master-Detail-Detail views they needed. With a successful proof of concept, Sutton Tools decided to use the combination of APEX and FOEX and moved to the development phase.

(Click to zoom in)

Separately, Sutton Tools was also managing a set of RESTful services which provide data to their end users, industrial companies and other business entities (e.g SalesForce). With FOEX’s enhanced capabilities the development team decided to extend the application’s initial scope from managing just product information to managing their services as well. Today these RESTful services are being consumed by using an interface created with FOEX on top of APEX.

Testimonial

"FOEX made it really easy for us to build data-centric pages and set up many Master-Detail-Detail views. Without it we couldn’t have built the application that our users needed. We cut the development time by more than 50% and were impressed by the speed at which we delivered the new system."

Steve Dowey (IT Manager, Sutton Tools)

Get a FOEX free trial!

Sign up and see how FOEX can enhance the functionality of APEX