E-Commerce

        We are interested in giving existing customers the ability to order
products and check on order / shipment status via the Internet.  I would
expect our volume to initially be about 25 new orders per day and 50 order
inquiries (this is a small percent of our total volume).  I have a feeling
many of our customers will prefer to place their order via the telephone but
would use the system for order inquiries.

        We are running JBA V3.5.0 on our AS/400 620 V4R2 along with multiple
NT servers on our LAN / WAN.   We also have a AS/400 150 V4R2 which is
currently not being used.   Our network is already connected to the Internet
with a firewall.

        I don't consider any of the JBA screens to be user friendly enough
for the casual user, nor would they have any logic for restricting customers
to only seeing information pertaining to them, so I don't think 5250
emulation or GUI'd/Java screen scraper version of existing screens would be
of much value.  For order entry, I would envision using a separate Internet
Order Entry application that we would feed into our system as if it had been
received as an ANSI X.12 850 Purchase Order (phase 1) and phase 2 load the
orders online with immediate inventory allocation, credit checking, etc.
Ability to handle credit cards would be a real plus.  Obviously this
application would have to receive downloaded items/prices from our JBA
system.   For order / shipment status inquiries I would prefer to have an
application developed that would access our JBA files online.  An option
would be to download this information on some schedule to another
application/server if there was a good package available already for order
status inquiries.

        We are in the exploratory stage.  We don't have much inhouse
expertise with E-Commerce and I'm considering hiring someone to handle that
for us.

        Any suggestions for tools and packages to help us attain our goals?
TIA.

Dan Thomas
Sr. VP Information Systems
Medical Distribution, Inc.
4500 Progress Blvd
Louisville, KY  40218-5058
Phone (502) 454-9013 ext 120
email  DThomas@lpw-mdi.com

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