Now that the Executive Information System was in place, the CIO paid me another visit and asked me to work up something for our field force.

The company has a dozen regional offices scattered about the country. From each of these, a team of advisors visits dealerships to spread the gospel. It wasn't very efficient in those days. The advisors would shuttle between their assigned areas and the regional office to collect printed reports and submit a mountain of paperwork.

There was a lot of air travel and hotel expense. We solved the problem using the mainframe, some minis, some micros, and a good helping of SNA.

There were AS/400s at each of the regional offices, and they were connected to the headquarters mainframe with an SNA network.

My manager wrote several programs in SAS that would pull reports out of the mainframe spool and send them to the AS/400s via Remote Job Entry.

I wrote a few thousand lines of C code that would allow the field staff to subscribe to reports, browse them off-line, send "email" and submit forms for processing.

After an encouraging pilot, we bought 150 early laptops and were amazed at the results. The field staff spend a lot more time with the dealers in the field and a lot less time in the air. Some actually moved their residences.

One early problem was the download speed. The fastest modems at the time were 2,400 bits per second, and the field staff subscribed to a lot of reports. Download times stretched to ten hours in some cases.

I ended up getting some source code for the new Lempel-Ziv-Welch compressor. I ported the C code to the AS/400 and added decompression to the workstation product. Unfortunately, the AS/400 just ran out of gas -- compression is CPU-intensive. I ported the code again to the mainframe and that's where it is today.

The field staff was ecstatic. Since the reports feeding the compression program were all upper case with lots of spaces, the compression rate was ten to one. Download times shrank to under an hour.

There were a number of technical challenges on this project, along with plenty of politics. It was an interesting experience coordinating with the AS/400 and mainframe folks, the field staff, and the applications programmers.

Change leadership was a topic revisited again and again on future projects.

Screen Shots:

• Main Menu

• Report Browser

• Setup Utility

• Mainframe

• Mainframe Close Up

• Primary AS/400s