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BestFoods
Industry
Food - Supply Chain Management System
Business
Challenge
How to overcome the object to relational paradigm mismatch between
application server and database. To find an alternative to the costly
and sometimes ineffective hand coding of objects.
Solution
Establishing a dynamic O/R layer on top of the JDBC driver to optimize
development using CocoBase Enterprise O/R.
Results
CocoBase Enterprise O/R has allowed us to keep in step with the
emerging needs of a $27 billion dollar food supply chain management
requirements. It has not only increased our search, retrieval and
persistence capabilities with its powerful, O/R mapping but strengthened
our supplier relationships worldwide as a direct result
this system's impressive functionality.
Flexible,
Efficient and Easy to Use
Following a recent merger with one of the largest worldwide food
suppliers, Unlilever, Best Foods challenged themselves to improve
extend their supply chain management system to allow their worldwide
field representatives to access, search and expedite product distribution.
With eight in-house engineers and substantially more virtual engineers
worldwide, EJB search and persistence needed to address the field
representative's requirements for a fast, flexible easy to use system.
CocoBase's ability to generate EJBs on the fly with extensive client
side querying features easily met the needed use requirements of
users. Hard coding EJB's no longer met these needs.
"Optimizing our EJB development with the use of CocoBase Enterprise
O/R
has increased our productivity by a factor of 10. Now that we are
deployed, we expect to continue to reap the benefits. Maintenance
will be incredibly easy!"
Andy Artler, Senior Software
Engineer
Best Foods, Inc.
Software
Tools / Technology Used
O/R Mapping Tool:
CocoBase Enterprise O/R, THOUGHT Inc.
Application
Server:
Gemstone Application Server, Brokat Inc.
JDE:
JBuilder from Borland
Inc.
Database:
Oracle.
Modeling
Tool:
No.
Company
Information
The Bestfoods
Baking Company is one of the leading premium fresh baked goods companies
in the United States. Its best-known brands are Entenmann's sweet
baked goods, Thomas' English muffins, bagels and waffles and Oroweat,
Brownberry and Arnold breads.
Bestfoods Baking Company
operates as a stand-alone operation. It is headquartered in Bay
Shore, New York, employing some 12,000 people at 19 plants across
the US. It has one of the country's largest and most efficient direct-store-delivery
systems, distributing fresh bakery products to more than 60,000
customers on almost 5,000 delivery routes. In 2000, Bestfoods Baking
Company had sales of US$1.8 billion, EBITDA of US$203 million and
EBIT of US$141 million.
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