Case Novart
Forum Nokia: Novart sell even better with Waplane
What do you do when your ultimate goal is to become a major provider of wireless middleware throughout Europe, the United States, and Asia? If you’re looking to become a global player in the wireless middleware market — as Sofor is — then you go where the customers are: to businesses that use Lotus Notes/Domino and Nokia mobile phones and want to give their salespeople, employees, and business partners real-time, always-on access to corporate applications, intelligence, and databases. That is what the 120-person Finnish development firm Sofor did with its development of Waplane, which allows wireless access to Notes and Domino applications, databases, and data. Among Sofor’s most recent Waplane deployments is one for Novart, Finland’s leading manufacturer of kitchen cabinetry. Waplane lets Novart’s 200 dealers get up-to-theminute information about product availability by tapping into Notes and Domino applications on Nokia mobile phones, using the Nokia Activ Server as a Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) server. The application is already paying dividends for Novart, even though it has been in use for only a short time.
Finnish developer Sofor is betting that providing wireless access to Lotus Notes and Domino applications will help the company become a global player in the wireless middleware market. An early result is the deployment of such applications for Novart, Finland’s leading manufacturer of kitchen cabinetry.
What Novart Needed
Novart manufactures more than 550,000 cabinets a year, and sells its products through a network of approximately 200 independent dealers as well as through its own increasingly mobile sales staff. It offers more than 300 designs that are produced in its two factories.
Because of the large number of designs, and the time and attention paid to manufacturing high-quality cabinets, there may be a waiting period before a particular model of cabinet becomes available from the factory. In the past, dealers have had to call the factory to ask about availability, and this has posed a problem. Typically, a dealer makes an evening sales call to a customer’s home, takes measurements for kitchen cabinets, and asks the customer to order the cabinets right then, says Novart Project Manager Heikki Jäämaa. But in the evening, after regular business hours, there has been no way for dealers to confirm availability or waiting time for delivery of the cabinets. Customers often do not want to place an order without knowing the delivery date, which meant the dealer had to call the factory the next day and then call the customer with delivery information. In the interim, the sale could be lost, Jäämaa notes.
Novart turned to Sofor for a solution. As part of its suite of tools, Sofor developed a Java™ technology-based Waplane application that provides mobile phone access to Notes and Domino applications, an outgrowth of earlier work to provide basic access to Notes through SMS.
Sofor used Waplane to provide wireless access to a Domino agent that polls Notes databases every hour to check on Novart’s factory capacity, which allows the dealer to ascertain delivery times for any type of cabinet. With Waplane and WAP browsers built into the Nokia 6310 mobile phones, dealers can tap into the Domino factory capacity agent and obtain current information about delivery times. This enables dealers to close sales at night, right in their customers’ homes, rather than forcing them to wait until the following day to get delivery dates. Although Novart’s Jäämaa says that it is too early to determine the actual return on investment because the application has only been up and running since January 2003, he is optimistic. “We are doing a pretty good business and we are now working overtime,” Jäämaa says, and he attributes at least part of the upturn to the application.
Waplane is not just for the dealers, though. Novart salespeople and employees use the application as well, not only to check on factory capacity when they’re not in the office, but also to send and receive Notes-based e-mail and to do group calendaring.
How Waplane Works
A several-tiered architecture gives Waplane users access to Notes and Domino applications. Domino servers sit at the customer site or an outsourced location, delivering Notes and Domino applications. The applications do not have to be rewritten or customized in order to be accessed via Waplane. Waplane can also enable the use of WebSphere-based applications, relational databases, and POP3/IMAP mail applications in addition to Notes and Domino applications.
The Java technology-based Waplane is a database/portal that sits on top of the Domino servers. Because Waplane uses terminaltype recognition, the application automatically recognizes the mobile phone or device accessing it and modifies its features accordingly. It offers remote access to Notes and Domino applications, notably e-mail, task lists, and contact lists, in addition to other, more specialized applications.
Michael Holm, director of export and wireless solutions for Sofor, says that Waplane accesses specific Notes and Domino functions such as e-mail straight out of the box. Other functions that enable wireless access to other
Domino databases can be added in anywhere from several hours to a day. “We take a subset of the application’s features and just ‘mobilize’ those,” Holm says. “A solution for a PC is completely different from that same solution working on a phone. On a CRM application, there are hundreds of things you can look up on a PC. But on the phone, you would only be able to look up the five most important ones. That is the first step in the process — specifying what information in your database you want to be accessed by a phone.”
Waplane also allows administrators to create profiles, which determine what rights users have to various databases, applications, and functions. In the case of the Novart Waplane application, the user is recognized by the mobile phone number from which he or she is calling, and rights are assigned based on Notes and Domino rights.
The Waplane application requires a WAP gateway server — in this case the Nokia Activ Server — for delivering WAP Web pages to the Nokia phones’ browsers and handling all communications between the mobile phone and Waplane.
When a user calls to access Notes and Domino applications, the call goes through the Nokia Activ Server and then to Waplane, which delivers information from the underlying Domino databases. The user connects to a portal-like page that displays all the available applications and tasks, as in the image shown. Applications can be browsed from here; for example, to get access to e-mail, a user browses to the Mail menu and sees a screen like this one.
Information can also be input and queries done, as shown in the following image. Because the queries and data being input are live, any changes made via the mobile phone will be made exactly as if the user were seated at his or her PC and using a Notes or Domino database.
How Nokia Helped
The Nokia Activ Server serves as Waplane’s WAP gateway so the Nokia Activ Server technical support staff was instrumental in helping to set up the WAP gateway and troubleshoot its interaction with Waplane, says Holm. Sofor also used the resources available on Forum Nokia in its development work.
Conclusion
Novart’s Jäämaa says that he expects sales to increase because Waplane now gives its dealers instant access to delivery dates, which enables them to close deals while at customers’ homes in the evenings. “And that’s just its first phase,” he says. “For phase two, we’re looking at mapping. One problem we have is that we don’t know where our deliveries are going at a certain time of the day, and with a mapping application, anyone would be able
to see right on their phone where our trucks are.”
As for Sofor, the Novart implementation is only one of many. Among its other customers are UPM Kymmene, one of the world’s largest paper companies, with 36,000 employees. To date, Sofor has sold 50,000 licenses for Waplane, Holm says. And he hopes that’s only the beginning.