Transitioning from Gentran to GIS… From what I hear this is going to be quite a big task migrating from Gentran, partly because its a whole different beast. I am in Lowell, MA this week to attend the GIS Fundamentals class, its a 5 day class that covers quite a bit of the main functions of the software. Today was day 1, and it was filled with a solid introduction of the basics and benefits of the Gentran Integration Suite. In addition to the introduction we covered the Graphical Process Modeler (GPM) and dove into BPML (Business Process Modeling Language) concepts and functions.

After the introduction was finished I felt I had a strong understanding to what GIS can do. It made me really start to think of all of the logic and business processes that we currently have in place on our AS/400 that are “hard coded” which take place after the translation process. It seems GIS will be able to handle all of the various checks and balances we have in place before dumping an order into our system. For example, on a 850 purchase order we check to see if a customer’s store exists in our customer master file or if that customer is allowed to order the product they are trying to order. All of these checks can be moved to the GIS system, although not with ease! There is going to be a learning curve to figure out the system and to transfer logic into a working business process.

We dove into BPML and how GIS utilizes this with the Graphical Process Modeler. Essentially the GPM builds the BPML for you, you can edit the BPML manually (and in some cases you have to).

Again, we only covered the basics today. I’ll report back with more later this week.

Has anyone else made the Gentran to GIS jump?