Abbott Diabetes Care UK: Improved and optimised iSeries-hosted MACPAC applications
Astech optimises value of MACPAC at Abbott Diabetes Care
Oxfordshire-based Abbott Diabetes Care UK, part of the Abbott Laboratories Medical Products Group, selected Astech Consultants Limited to help improve the commercial benefit the company derives from its iSeries-hosted MACPAC applications.
MACPAC is a legacy suite of business management applications that encompasses sales order processing, manufacturing, distribution and financials. Pre-dating the emergence of ERP systems, MACPAC requires regular enhancements and development in order for it to keep pace with the demands of the modern enterprise.
Chris Cook, Strategic Projects & Development Manager at Abbott Diabetes Care, explains that the initial focus for Astech is to help improve the company’s financial reporting and analytical tools:
“Astech is currently working alongside our own developer on the finance side of the business to deliver a range of value added projects for internal end users. For instance, these include the development of functionality not available in MACPAC. The purpose is to derive greater value from our legacy investments by making more eloquent use of the data. Examples include reports that consolidate a wide variety of diverse data into a single user perspective, an application to reconcile stock differences, analysis short cuts to avoid the use of labour intensive spreadsheet analysis and so on. These projects typically take three to four days of development effort with a payback well within the current trading period.”
Astech staff are very professional and courteous, believes Chris Cook:
“Their delivery-oriented approach to work is a huge benefit that we are valuing more and more as their knowledge of us and MACPAC increases. In particular they do something not very common in analyst programmers – they’re willing to go and sit with end users even before they know the applications in any detail. We’re pleased to be building this relationship with Astech for there are very few companies with the skills and resources available to provide development resource on MACPAC.
“As to the future, we are constantly looking for cost improvements within the department. We can’t afford to have a core departmental competence in a legacy technology. I am hopeful that our relationship with Astech will continue.”
Conor Byrne-Jones, Head of Consultancy at Astech Consultants is delighted with how the contract is progressing: “We may not have been familiar with MACPAC at the outset but this initial learning curve is balanced by our wealth of manufacturing and iSeries skills and experience. As we become a more integral part of the Abbott team we hope that our partnership approach to application development will help continue to build the relationship.”
Written in RPG, MACPAC is an AS/400 flat file application, originally developed by Anderson Consulting but recently sold to TDCI. Abbott Diabetes Care has approximately 250 registered MACPAC users.
