MAPICS, Inc. is headquartered in Atlanta with offices around the globe and a worldwide sales network of over 75 affiliates, serving customers in more than 70 countries. With more than 20 years of proven expertise, MAPICS is one of the world's leading providers of enterprise applications specifically designed to meet the needs of mid-sized manufacturing enterprises.

The Company's flagship solutions include XA and Point.Man, two powerful extended enterprise applications (EEA) streamlining business processes for manufacturing, customer service, engineering, supply chain planning and financials. Extended enterprise applications use Web-based technologies to extend the integrated capabilities of vertically-focused ERP solutions to a company's value chain partners, securely linking them into core business systems.

MAPICS tests their application using the Mercury load runner tool to simulate a production environment. Mercury allows you to see the SQL statements being generated, and surfaces the time each request takes. Once a SQL statement has been identified as running too slow, they will import the statement into Visual SQL Explain feature of the insure/INDEX module to analyze how the Query Optimizer implemented that statement. Below are some of the results they have been able to achieve. AS/400 Stats: Model 620 2181, Version 4.4 OS/400, 45GB DASD, 1 GB memory.

Use Visual SQL Explain to analyze the SQL statements to determine how the optimizer is building the access plans and experiment with the different AS/400 environmental options to achieve the best performance for the particular statement.

Visual SQL Explain allows us to test the various tuning options available on the AS/400 with out having to recompile the program each time and sort through multiple messages to understand the ramifications of the changes we made. It surfaces the needed information in an easy to understand picture and gives us statistics about why the optimizer did what it did. Therefore, we can make the proper decisions how best to implement our SQL statements.

Example: Our application previously took over a minute to bring up a customer demand list panel. Advanced Performance Server identified a missing access path and created the access path. After creating the access path, the list panel was displayed in less than 5 seconds.

Example: A panel to process MRP recommendations was taking 45 seconds to process the transaction. Advanced Performance Server identified why the SQL Optimizer was not able to use the access path we expected. After fixing the SQL statement, it now takes approximately 2 seconds to process the MRP transactions.

Using insure/INDEX module, it takes us a few minutes to analyze and fix problems. Using traditional methods, it can take an entire day.

"We are very pleased with the results we have been able to achieve utilizing the insure/INDEX, says Dave Colvin, Application Manager, the strength of the XA Client Architecture applications is the ability to customize to our clients' environment and having Centerfield Technology's tools helps those implementations go smoothly."